Question

I have an ArrayList and wish to be able to call an index and use the returned string for a method call.

e.g.

stringList.get(2)();

Is there any way I could go about this?

Answer 1

First of call you can’t call a method in java without an object to call it on. Is that in the list also.

It would be better to have a list of Runnable…

List<Runnable> runnables = ...
runnables.get(2).call();

If you have the object you need to call, and you want to use reflection (can be slow) then commons-beans can help make it simple. See http://commons.apache.org/beanutils

import org.apache.commons.beanutils.MethodUtils;

Object target = ...
List<String> methodNames = ...
MethodUtils.invokeMethod(target, methodNames.get(2), /*args*/ null);

To give better I’d advice I’d need to know more about the problem you are trying to solve.