If statement help (noob)

Question

I was trying to grab the first character from user entry, and determine it to be a vowel or not. I am very new, and have been struggling with this for a while. I am trying to add all vowels to the variable 'vowel', and not only will that obviously not work, but I feel like I am going the long way. Any help at all is vastly appreciated as I am very new to this.

entry = scanner.nextLine();
letters = entry.substring(0,1);
holder = entry.substring(1);
vowels = "A";


if (entry.substring(0,1).equals(vowels)) {
    pigLatinVowel = entry + "way";
    System.out.println(pigLatinVowel);
}

`substring` returns inclusive to exclusive, thus your substring gets nothing. — Andrew Li, Sep 26 '16 at 23:01
First problem I see is that none of your variables have types. For example, for the line were you assign ```"A"``` to ```vowels```, it should be ```String vowels = "A"```. Since all of your variables are strings you should do that for all of them. Then this snippet would only work for inputted strings that start with a capital A. EDIT: Assuming you've fixed the problem stated by Andrew L — Neil Locketz, Sep 26 '16 at 23:01
You don't show what type vowels is. You "keep adding vowels to the variable vowels". Perhaps look at http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask — John3136, Sep 26 '16 at 23:02

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 26 '16 at 23:02

First, since you only want one character, don't use string methods, i.e. use entry.charAt(0) == 'A' instead of entry.substring(0,1).equals("A").

With that, you can then turn it around:

"AEIOU".indexOf(entry.charAt(0))

If the character at position 0 in the entry variable can be found, indexOf() returns the index position (zero-based), otherwise it returns -1.

So, to see if it is a vowel, do this:

if ("AEIOU".indexOf(entry.charAt(0)) != -1) {
    pigLatinVowel = entry + "way";
    System.out.println(pigLatinVowel);
}

If statement help (noob)

1 Answers1