Question

I’m making a basic program that requires the use of all the letters’ indices in the alphabet. I made an array and tried to add something to it, but NetBeans keeps saying that it “cannot find symbol: class “alphabet””. My code is similar to the following:

public class MyClass {
    char[] alphabet = new char[26];
    alphabet[0] = 'a';
    // et cetera
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Stuff
    }
}

Any ideas as to why NetBeans says no to the above? My bet is that I’ve gotten something very basic wrong, but I just can’t figure out what…

Edit: as requested, a more comprehensive code is posted. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Answer 1

You need to place

alphabet[0] = ‘a’;

in a method or constructor not the class block.

Also it cannot be the main method as this is an instance variable. E.g.:

public class Alpha  {
    char[] alphabet = new char[26];

    public Alpha() {
        alphabet[0] = 'a';
    }

}