Question

I have an arrayList called A, say, which is non-empty.

I create another arrayList, B, and put in some elements of A.

for(someobject obj : A){
                   if(some_condition_is_met)
                             B.add(obj);
}

Then I do some stuff with B (never modifying, shuffling, or deleting objects from it. I pick an element of B, say B.get(i).

Now, I want to find B.get(i)’s position in A.

I tried

for(someobject obj : A){
                   if(obj.equals(B.get(i))
                             return A.lastIndexOf(obj);
}
return null;

But this kept returning null. That is, “equals” doesn’t match the objects.

SO in my frustration I tried:

return A.get(A.lastIndexOf(B.get(i));

which caused an ArrayINdexOutOfBounds exception.

Any ideas what I should do? I’ve got a feeling I’m missing something obvious.
One more point – this is an incredibly simplified explanation of what I’m doing. In the above example creating B might seem pointless, but it is necessary.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS:

1)The objects are custom objects. Ah,… I didn’t override equals. That might be it.

2) I can be sure any object in B mst B in A because on creating B, first I remove all from it, just in case, then I add only object from A and I do not tamper with the objects once in B.

Answer 1

The principle of what you are trying to do should work. I could make the quibble that there is little point in doing the FOR loop to search through A to find an instance of the object from B, and then doing a lastIndexOf on it. lastIndexOf will iterate through A anyway. You are searching for something, and then when you find it you are just leaving it where it lies and searching for it all over again. (Admittedly, your first search is from the beginning of A while lastIndexOf will search from the end. So this is like looking for your car keys starting in the basement and working up to the attic. Then when you find them, you leave them there, and then go to the attic and start the search again working your way down to the basement.)

I suspect that the problem is not in the concept, but in the details. You might show the actual code. If the code is too complex, try simplifying it down to the essentials and see if the error still occurs.

One possibility: Do you really add the object from A to B directly? Or are you creating a new object for B that is a copy of the object from A? If the latter, then unless you override equals() it’s not going to work, because the default equals() for a user-defined object just checks if they are the same instance, not “equivalent” objects.