Question

I created a method to basically detect white space characters. I go through a string and check each character for white space. If it is a white space character, I return true, and if it’s not, I return false. However, I get a compilation error, stating “missing return statement”. As I already have two return statements “true” and “false”, I can’t see why there is an error. Can you help me out or point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

public boolean isWhitespace()
{
    for (int i=0; i<string.length(); i++)
    {
        if (Character.isWhitespace(i))
        {
            return true;
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

You are looping over the length of the String, yet trying to return inside that loop. The logic doesn’t make sense.

Think about the problem you are trying to solve – do you want to test if a character is a whitespace, or if an entire String contains at least one whitespace character? For the latter:

boolean hasWhite = false;
for(int i=0; i < string.length(); i++)
{
  if(Character.isWhitespace(string.charAt(i)))
  {
     hasWhite = true;
     break;
  }
}

return hasWhite;

EDIT: A much simpler approach, if you’re into that sorta thing 😉 –

return string.contains(" ");