Working with Switch Statements: Objective 1

It can't infer what you're trying to do from what you've written because you're giving it very different directions.

What you have is basically telling Swift that when it loops through the keys each key is going print the contents of the array you've specified into the console.

Let's simplify this by redefining the first case as a single if then conditional representing the first true part of the case statement and an else signifying the default portion.

for (key, value) in world {
    // Enter your code below
    if key == "BEL" {
        print(europeanCapitals)
    } else {
        print(otherCapitals)
    }
    // End code
}

This will return [] in your playground result for the if part and then seven repetitions of [] for else. In the console you should get the following:

[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]

Other than it knowing the variables we're printing is an array it doesn't know what should be in them. Put another way, what we're doing is reading the arrays eight times when we want to be adding information to them.

You may also be getting an error that value is a mutable type that isn't being used in your expression, this should be a giveaway that something isn't correct.

Instead, we want to add each of those values to the arrays, we can do this two ways. First, since the arrays exist we can use the append method that is automatically part of the array type:

europeanCapitals.append(value)

We're taking each value and appending it to the array through the dot notation syntax.

The other way we could do it is to concatenate the existing arrays with new ones we're creating each loop through:

europeanCapitals = europeanCapitals + [value]

You can do whichever makes the most sense to you, they do the same thing but the dot notation feels cleaner to me so it's what I originally used when doing this exercise.

Just don't use both, it's best to be consistent or it makes it more difficult for us to read:

switch key {
    case "BEL", "LIE", "BGR":
        europeanCapitals = europeanCapitals + [value]
    case "IND", "VNM":
        asianCapitals.append(value)
    default:
        otherCapitals.append(value)
    }

One other thing you might note is that you don't have to explicitly provide the case statements for the otherCapitals, just set the default and let it catch everything that doesn't fit the other two arrays we've defined.

In real life, I'd probably try to have an appropriate array for each of the values I know I'll be using — in this case that would be an americanCapitals array (or northAmericanCapitals and southAmericanCapitals), only use otherCapitals as a backup, but given that we're explicitly naming it other I think using the default is more appropriate in the challenge.