Question

I have a trivial, but irritating problem in Java. Suppose we have the following class and method:

class A{
    void doSth(int[] array){    
        int index1, index2, index3;
        int value1, value2, value3;    

        if(array[index1] > 10){    
            //Long code modifies value1, value2, value3
        }  

        if(array[index3] > 100){    
            //Same long code modifies value1, value2, value3
        }      

        if(array[index2] > 20){    
            //Same long code modifies value1, value2, value3
        }    
    }

Disregarding what this is trying to achieve, I would like to somehow make this redundancies disappear. usually, I would pass the values to a hlper method, but I can’t, since the block is modifying local variables. Any idea how to simplify this?

Answer 1

It sounds like you value1, value2 and value3 probably have some meaning in combination. So encapsulate them into a separate class, and at that point you can call a method which either modifies an existing instance or returns a new instance of that class. Either way, with a single local variable you’ll be fine.