Question

I’m having a problem in which the method outputs null instead of returning the (n+1)th item of the list. Is there anything that I’m overlooking .

    public static ListElement getItem(ListElement head, int n){
    if(n == 0){                 
        return head;

    }else if(head == null){

            return null;
    }else{                      

        return  getItem(head.getNext(),n+1);

    }

}

Answer 1

This code doesn’t make sense. If head is not null, it will call getItem(head.getNext(), n+1) but eventually, head will equal null (and n will never go to 0) and therefore it will return you null. Maybe you meant

return getItem(head.getNext(), n-1).