Question

I need to shorten my char[] by one letter each time I pass through the code. The arguments I’m using are hello and hel. It should return true false false. At least that’s what I think it should return. I think what I have so far is close:

private void doDountSubStringMatchRecursive(String target, String key){
    char[] targetChar= target.toCharArray();//long one
    char[] keyChar= key.toCharArray();//short one
    for (int i = 0; i <=targetChar.length- keyChar.length; i++ ){
        System.out.println(testHelper(targetChar , keyChar));
        String recursive = targetChar.toString(); //Turns into a string
        targetChar = recursive.substring(1).toCharArray();//moves my string starting point over by one and converts the char[]
        System.out.println(targetChar.toString() + "  " +  keyChar.toString() );
    }
}


private boolean testHelper(char[] targetChar , char[] keyChar){
    boolean test = false;

    for (int i=0; i <= keyChar.length - 1; i++){ // runs through the char[] and states the test         
        if (keyChar[i] == targetChar[i]) {
            test =  true;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return test;

}

And this is my output:

true
[C@24c21495  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@1cc2ea3f  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@40a0dcd9  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@1034bb5  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@7f5f5897  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@4cb162d5  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@11cfb549  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@5b86d4c1  [C@41d5550d
false
[C@70f9f9d8  [C@41d5550d

I don’t get what this is doing now. And yes I know I could just find occurrence of the key by using indexof(key).

Answer 1

It’s not clear exactly what your code is supposed to do, as you haven’t really stated the problem very clearly. However, there is one bug that you should fix right away:

targetChar.toString()

does not do what you think it does. It gives you the String representation of the char array object (which is something like “C@24c21495”), not an interpretation of that array as a sequence of characters. If you want a String representing the sequence of characters in the array, then you want to call

String.valueOf(targetChar)

or

new String(targetChar)

to convert the char[] into a more helpful String.

This change might help you debug the rest of your code.