Question

I need help with a piece of code I’m writing. I want to compute the median of an array. Initially the types were all ints and it compouted the median with integer division which gave me a wrong answer. I changed everything to doubles but I’m getting a type mismatch error saying I can’t convert doubles to ints which doesn’t really make sense. Can someone help. This is my code:

public class MedianTest {

   public static void main(String[] args) {

      double median = 0;
      double myValues[] = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };

      double arrayHalfOdd = ((myValues.length - 1) / 2) + 1;
      double arrayHalfEven = ((myValues.length - 1) / 2);

      if ((myValues.length - 1) % 2 == 0) {
         median = (myValues[arrayHalfEven] + myValues[arrayHalfEven + 1]) / 2;
      } else {
         median = myValues[arrayHalfOdd];
      }
      System.out.print(median);
   }

}

the errors are in the myValues[arrayHalfEven] and myValues[arrayHalfOdd]

By the way this IS NOT homework

Answer 1

final answer:

    if (myValues.length == 0) {
        throw new IllegalStateException();
    }
    else if (myValues.length == 1) {
        return myValues[0];
    }
    else {
        int halfRoundedUp = myValues.length / 2;
        if (myValues.length % 2 == 0) { // even count, average the middle values
            return (myValues[halfRoundedUp - 1] + myValues[halfRoundedUp]) / 2;
        }
        else { // odd, take the middle value
            return myValues[halfRoundedUp];
        }
    }