Question

I’m trying to figure out how to create a method to find a string inside an array and print that string out along with its index. I think the method signature is correct but I can’t figure out how to return the string value in the method.

String name = search(array,"Dog"); //the method implementation in main
System.out.println(name);

.

public static int search(String[] array, String key)
{
    for (int i= 0; i< array.length; i++)
        {
         if ( array[i] == key ) 
         return i;  
        }
     return ("Name cannot be found in array);
}

Answer 1

You can’t return a String from a method that is declared to return int. The most common ways to indicate failure are to return an out-of-range value:

return -1;

Or to throw an exception:

throw new NameNotFoundException("Name cannot be found in array");

---

Also, this line won’t work:

if ( array[i] == key ) 

Strings need to be compared with equals(), not ==. The == operator checks that the strings are the same objects, not that their contents are identical.

if (key == null && array[i] == null ||
    key != null && key.equals(array[i]))

And make sure that you don’t call .equals() on a null reference. The above code checks for this possibility.