I've been getting an "illegal start of expression" error when trying to compile this for loop inside a if statement in java. Does anyone have any idea why?
if(letter.equals(" ") || letter == null ||for(String a: array){ letter.equals(a);}) 5 Answers
Try
if( letter == null || letter.equals(" ") || checkArray(array, letter)) { ... } boolean checkArray(String[] arryay, String letter) { for(String a: array) if(letter.equals(a)) return true; return false; } Note: checking letter for null after you have already called equals() does not make too much sense; i've reordered those.
You cannot. Perhaps you should move the if statement into the for statement?
As rfausak said, a for statement does not return a boolean. You should have made that an answer by the way.
If you use a Set you could write:
if ( (letter.equals(" ")) || (letter == null) || (a.contains(letter)) ) {} Well, that´s because you can not have a for loop within an if condition. It seems you want to see if the letter is within the array array; if so then you can do it with Apache commons-lang's ArrayUtils:
ArrayUtils.contains( array, letter ); This wont work because a for doesn't evaluate to a boolean. For readabilities sake you should extract that to a method anyway, good examples appear in other answers.
Other points, you should rejig your conditionals to not be susceptible to NullPointerExceptions
if (letter == null || " ".equals(letter) || arrayContains(array, letter)) { //... } If you are able to add additional libraries, there are some nice apache commons libraries to make this work easier, namely StringUtils in commons-lang and CollectionUtils in commons-collections.
You also may like to harden that input checking if it's possible to get Strings larger than one character, by using String#trim() after checking for null. Again, this would be a good candidate for an extracted method isBlank(String str).
