How to search for String that has more than one word in ArrayList?

Question

My search method works fine for one word strings, but not for two words or more.

I am supposed to check to see if the titleToFind matches a DVD title in the

ArrayList<DVD>DVDlist

My search method:

public DVD search(String titleToFind) {
    for (DVD dvdEntry : DVDlist) {
        if (dvdEntry.GetTitle().equalsIgnoreCase(titleToFind)) {
            return dvdEntry;
        }
    }
    return null;
}

I am not sure how to approach this problem.

Answer 1

Your main problem is that you stop searching when you hit your first match (the return statement in the loop). Below is an example of returning a list containing all the matches.

If you are not allowed to use a list, you could return an int (number of matches) or csv of matches.

public List<DVD> search(String titleToFind) {
    List<DVD> matches = new ArrayList<DVD>();    
    for (DVD dvdEntry : DVDlist) {
        if (dvdEntry.GetTitle().equalsIgnoreCase(titleToFind)) {
            matches.add(dvdEntry);
        }
    }

    return matches;
}