Question

I have two arraylists, one contains Strings and the other contains Classes that have a String data member. The goal is to recurse through the objects in the second arraylist, and find which object’s string data member equals a string value in the first arraylist.

Now I understand that you cannot use the == operator to compare strings, so I initially used the equals method, and now I’ve tried the contentEquals method, however regardless of the method I choose the strings are always classified as equal – even when they are not. So whenever I run the code below, the “if” statement always returns true the first time it is called, regardless of whether the strings are actually equal.

Iterator stringListIter = stringList.iterator();
Iterator objectListIter = objectList.iterator();
while (stringListIter.hasNext())
{
    String currentString = (String) stringListIter.next();
    while (objectListIter.hasNext())
    {
        MyObject currentObject = (MyObject) objectListIter.next();
        String objectString = currentObject.getString();
        if (objectString.contentEquals(currentString));
        {
            //Do something here.....
            break;
        }
    }
}

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I get the feeling its probably something that is fairly simple, but I just can’t see it.

Answer 1

The problem is you have an extraneous semicolon:

if (objectString.contentEquals(currentString));

This statement essentially does nothing so the following block is always executed.