Question

If I have the two functions below.
How can I select the function that will be chosen?

I imagine there is either some form of statement to determine the content of the scanner and therefore only have one function. Or it would be something that is passed to the function.

    public static int questionAsk(String question)
{
    Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
    System.out.print (question+"\n");
    System.out.print ("Answer: ");
    return scan.nextInt();
}
    public static String questionAsk(String question)
{
    Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
    System.out.print (question+"\n");
    System.out.print ("Answer: ");
    return scan.nextLine();
}

Answer 1

There is no way for the compiler to know which one of those methods you are calling. You could make it type safe by changing the String Types to something else, like this:

    public static int questionAsk(IntQuestion question)
{
    Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
    System.out.print (question.toString() +"\n");
    System.out.print ("Answer: ");
    return scan.nextInt();
}
    public static String questionAsk(StringQuestion question)
{
    Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
    System.out.print (question.toString() +"\n");
    System.out.print ("Answer: ");
    return scan.nextLine();
}

And adding two new classes:

   public class IntQuestion extends String{
       public IntQuestion(String question){
            super(question);
       }
   }

   public class StringQuestion extends String{
        public StringQuestion(String question){
            super(question);
        }
   }

When you construct an IntQuestion of StringQuestion, you can simply construct them the same way you would construct a String if you called the constructor:

IntQuestion intQuestion = new IntQuestion("Some String Here");

This is just a little bit of syntactic sugar to get the compiler to play nice and select the correct method based on the type.

I hope this helps.