Question

I’m working on (what is to a beginner) a rather complex assignment. I think I’ve got the jist of it down, but I’m having trouble with it printing “null” after Monday-Sunday are entered into the dialog box. Also, the goal of the assignment is, later, for the user to enter a number 0-6 and then the corresponding weekday (from the String[] weekArray set in the method) is printed. I’m not really sure how to do this and my book doesn’t seem to be showing me the way, but am I even going to be able to do that the way my code is set up? Thanks and best regards. Here’s the code.

EDIT – there’s an example in my book under returning an array from a method. I’m not sure if it’s applicable to my assignment as they seem to have different goals, but here it is..

EDIT#2 – instructions for reference to what I’m doing.

EDIT#3 – my interpretation of the example for passing methods to arrays.

EDIT #4 – solved the issue. I was going about it the wrong way for much. The book’s example wasn’t much help. Thanks to those of you who replied. I deleted the homework assignment description in consideration of the professor (who probably wouldn’t like his assignments on the internet next semester)

Excerpt of the code below… I was making this way more complicated than it was

public static String[] getWeek() {
    String[] weekArray = new String[7];
for (int i = 0; i < weekArray.length; i++) {
    weekArray[0] = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Enter 'Monday'. ");
    if (weekArray[0].compareTo("Monday") > 0) {
        weekArray[0] = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Enter 'Monday'. ");

Answer 1

Your branches have unreachable statements –

weekArray[5] = ...
while(weekArray[5].equalsIgnoreCase(null)) {
  // Cannot reach this point as equalsIgnoreCase(null) always returns false.
}

From String#equalsIgnoreCase:

true if the argument is not null and the Strings are equal, ignoring case; false otherwise.

Emphasis mine.

EDIT: From your edit above you appear to be having trouble with populating an array. The rough idea is:

public static void main(String[] args) {
  // Just an example
  int[] values = new int[5];
  System.out.println(Arrays.toString(values));

  populateArray(values);
  System.out.println(Arrays.toString(values));
}

private static void populateArray(int[] toBePopulated) {
  toBePopulated[0] = 42;
  toBePopulated[1] = 11;
  // Etc. Again, just an example.
}

This will print:

[0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

[42, 11, 0, 0, 0]

The idea is that what is passed to the method populateArray is a reference to the location of the array in memory. That means that you can manipulate the contents of the array, and the change will be reflected in values afterwards.