Question

I need to store a load of content which I retrieved from http. I have created a method to do the retrieving of contents. But I need to store it in an array which is declared outside. I am having troubles doing return value.

My question is:

1)Where do I place my return statement?

2)How do I store the contents from searchInfo into the array mStrings[]?

This is my code.

public class MainActivity extends Activity
{
ListView list;
Adapter adapter;

private static final String targetURL ="http://www.google.com/images";

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);

    list=(ListView)findViewById(R.id.list);
    adapter=new Adapter(this, mStrings);
    list.setAdapter(adapter);
    }

    public String searchInfo()
{
    try {
        // Get the URL from text box and make the URL object

        URL url = new URL(targetURL);

        // Make the connection
        URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
         new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));

        // Read the contents line by line (assume it is text),
        // storing it all into one string
        String content ="";
        String line = reader.readLine();  
        Pattern sChar = Pattern.compile("&.*?;");
        Matcher msChar = sChar.matcher(content);
        while (msChar.find()) content = msChar.replaceAll("");

        while (line != null) {

            if(line.contains("../../"))
            {                   
                content += xyz;
                line = reader.readLine();                   
            }

            else if (line.contains("../../") == false)
            {
                line = reader.readLine();
            }

        }

        // Close the reader
        reader.close();

    } catch (Exception ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }   

}

private String[] mStrings={searchImage()};

}

Answer 1

You have a few options:

1. You can declare mStrings[] as an instance variable (put protected String[] mStrings; right after the line where you declare the Adapter) and then initialize it in your onCreate method (mStrings = new String[SIZE];) where SIZE is the size for your array. After that, your searchInfo method can just add items to mString and doesn’t have to return anything (since a instance variable is visible to all members fo the class).

2. You can change searchInfo’s signature so it returns String[] and then declare a temp string array inside that method, add the items to it and return it to the caller ( mStrings = searchInfo();)

In both the cases above, it assumes you know the length of the array (so you can initialize it). You could use an ArrayList instead of a String array since those can grow dynamically. You can then convert the arrayList to an array with:

yourArrayList.toArray(mStrings);

as long as you’ve initialize mStrings to something non-null (i.e. mStrings = new String[1];)