Question

I am interested in a very simple string verification problem to see if the starting character in a string starts with an upper case letter and then have the console to display true or false. From my understanding you wouldn’t have to invoke something like System.console().printf(“true”, s) in order to make this happen. I could swear I’ve seen similar elementary implementations achieved using the following sample code:

public class Verify {
    public static boolean checkStartChar(String s) {
        if (s.startsWith("[A-Z]")) {
            return true;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String str = "abCD";
        checkStartChar(str);
    }
}

but when I run this, nothing displays. If I make a slight modification by adding in conditional printouts before returning T/F, e.g.

public class Verify2 {
    public static boolean checkStartChar(String s) {
        if (s.startsWith("[A-Z]")) {
            System.out.println("yep");
            return true;
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("nope");
            return false;
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String str = "abCD";
        checkStartChar(str);
    }
}

the issue is somewhat resolved, as the console displays either “yep” or “nope”, yet unresolved because I just want the console to display true or false. That’s it. Advice?

Answer 1

yet unresolved because I just want the console to display true or false

Calling checkStartChar method will return value, that doesn’t mean it will print value to console. You need to code how you would like to handle return value. If you want to print return value, then you should do:

System.out.println(checkStartChar(str));

Will print what ever the return of checkStartChar method