Question

While writing my program I got “cannot find symbol message” when I tried to invoke the method setTextArea() from another class. After compiling the program I am getting the following error message:
Uncompilable source code – Erroneous sym type: gui.setTextArea

Here is my code:

public class LinkExtractor {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        //Validate.isTrue(args.length == 1, "usage: supply url to fetch");
        String base = "http://uk.ask.com/web?q=";
        String keyword ="flowers";
        String tale="&search=&qsrc=0&o=312&l=dir";
        String url =base+keyword+tale;

        print("Fetching %s...", url);

        Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).get();
        Elements links = doc.select("a[href]");

        print("\nLinks: (%d)", links.size());
        for (Element link : links) {
            print(" * a: <%s>  (%s)", link.attr("abs:href"), trim(link.text(), 35));
      AssistantGUI gui=new AssistantGUI();

        }
    }

    public static void print(String msg, Object... args) {
      ***//here is the problem line***
        gui.setTextArea(String.format(msg, args));

    }

    private static String trim(String s, int width) {
        if (s.length() > width)
            return s.substring(0, width-1) + ".";
        else
            return s;
    }
}

And here is my second class:

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;

public class AssistantGUI {
JFrame frame= new JFrame("TextArea frame");
JPanel panel=new JPanel();
JTextArea text= new JTextArea("",5,20);


public AssistantGUI(){

frame.add(panel);
panel.add(text);
frame.setSize(250,200);
frame.setVisible(true);
frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

}
public void setTextArea(String myString){
text.append(myString);
}
public static void main(String[] args){
AssistantGUI gui= new AssistantGUI();

gui.setTextArea("Hello");
}

}

I read many posts with a similar issue, but couldn’t find a solution. Everything looks fine to me. I am creating an instance of AssistantGUI and then I am using it to call the method setTextArea(), why it does not recognise it? Any ideas? I will really appreciate your help.

Answer 1

There is now a correct answer of @RameshK. In Object Oriented style: do something like this (making things non-static):

AssistantGUI gui = new AssistantGUI();

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    new LinkExctractor().execute();
}

private void execute() {
    //Validate.isTrue(args.length == 1, "usage: supply url to fetch");
    String base = "http://uk.ask.com/web?q=";
    String keyword ="flowers";
    String tail = "&search=&qsrc=0&o=312&l=dir";
    String url = base + keyword + tail;

    print("Fetching %s...", url);

    Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).get();
    Elements links = doc.select("a[href]");

    print("\nLinks: (%d)", links.size());
    for (Element link : links) {
        print(" * a: <%s>  (%s)", link.attr("abs:href"), trim(link.text(), 35));
    }
}

private void print...