Question

I am having trouble with this method of my class. It always returns false.
Passenger is a separate class. This is a method in my Train class which creates an array list of Passenger objects. I am making a method that will search the ArrayList passengerList for a Passanger object with the name as the parameter.

public boolean search(String a){
    Passenger temp;
    boolean query = false;
    for (int i =0; i<passengerList.size(); i++)
    {
        temp=passengerList.get(i);
        if (temp.getName() == a)
        {
            query = true;
        }
    }
    return query;
}

Answer 1

 if (temp.getName() == a)

should be

 if (temp.getName().equals(a))

String comparison should always use equals() method instead of == (except that strings literals).

if temp.getName() and a both not pointing to same object, == condition will fail.

== checks for references equality. equals() checks for content equality.

This tutorial may help you.