looping through an array in java

Question

I'm working on a program that searches through an array to match a String . I currently have it set so that when a there is no match the following is printed: No record has been found . My problem is that it prints that text in every iteration. How can i change it so it prints it only once? heres my code:

public static Employee[] searchWithId(Employee[] list, String search) {
    System.out.println("Searching for the id number: " + search);
    Employee[] filteredEmployees = new Employee[list.length];
    int index = 0;
    for (Employee list1 : list) {
        if (list1.getIdNumber().equals(search)) {
            System.out.println("Found id number: " + search);
            filteredEmployees[index++] = list1;
            String filtered = Arrays.toString(filteredEmployees).replace("[","")
                    .replace("]","").replace("null", "").replace(",", "");
            System.out.println(filtered);
        } else if (!(list[index].getIdNumber().equals(search))) {
            System.out.println("No record has been found for the id number: " + search);
        }
    }  
    return Arrays.copyOfRange(filteredEmployees, 0,index);
}

Desired output:

Searching for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432

Current output:

Searching for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432
No record has been found for the id number: P102432

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The short and direct answer:

Because your print statement is contained in your loop, it will print out however many times your loop iterates. Creating a boolean to facilitate whether or not the value has been found (and then break ing out of the loop) will suffice to have the message print out; the concept of this has been pointed out in this answer .

However, with Java 8, there are several advantages you can get with a rewrite:

• You can filter elements out based on a condition.
• You can collect elements to a proper collection, such as List<Employee> (which you could turn back into an array if you really wanted to).
• The code is a lot cleaner and a lot more expressive; it's clear from the lambdas below that you're filtering.

Here is that code rewritten for use with Java 8.

public static Employee[] searchWithId(Employee[] list, String search) {
    System.out.println("Searching for the id number: " + search);

    final List<Employee> filteredEmployees = Arrays.stream(list)
                                                   .filter(e -> e.getIdNumber().equals(search))
                                                   .collect(Collectors.toList());

    if(filteredEmployees.isEmpty()) {
        System.out.println("No record has been found for the id number: " + search);
    }

    return filteredEmployees.toArray(new Employee[0]);
}

I will say that it doesn't make sense to have more than one Employee record to have the same ID, but this is something I leave to your discretion.

Answer 2

This should solve your problem, while looking for the employ if i found thim i exit the loop and do nothing, but if i can't find him and i got out of the loop i will print the message.

public static Employee[] searchWithId(Employee[] list, String search){
    System.out.println("Searching for the id number: " + search);
    Employee[] filteredEmployees = new Employee[list.length];
    boolean resultFound = false;
    int index = 0;
    for (Employee list1 : list) {
        if (list1.getIdNumber().equals(search)) {
            System.out.println("Found id number: " + search);
            filteredEmployees[index++] = list1;
            String filtered = Arrays.toString(filteredEmployees).replace("[","").replace("]","").replace("null", "").replace(",", "");
            System.out.println(filtered);
            resultFound = true;
            break;
        }
    }

    if(!resultFound){
          System.out.println("No record has been found for the id number: " + search);
    }

     return Arrays.copyOfRange(filteredEmployees, 0,index);
}

Answer 3

Added a bool to check if found/not.

public static Employee[] searchWithId(Employee[] list, String search){
    System.out.println("Searching for the id number: " + search);
    Employee[] filteredEmployees = new Employee[list.length];
    boolean recordExist = false;
    int index = 0;
    for (Employee list1 : list) {
        if (list1.getIdNumber().equals(search)) {
            System.out.println("Found id number: " + search);
            recordExist = true;
            filteredEmployees[index++] = list1;
            String filtered = Arrays.toString(filteredEmployees).replace("[","").replace("]","").replace("null", "").replace(",", "");
            System.out.println(filtered);
        }
    }
     if (!recordExist)
       System.out.println("No record has been found for the id number: " + search);
     return Arrays.copyOfRange(filteredEmployees, 0,index);
}

Answer 4

This is not a good way to write java code in arrays instead use Collections but for this use case

public static Employee[] searchWithIdNew(Employee[] list, String search){
        System.out.println("Searching for the id number: " + search);
        Employee[] emps = new Employee[list.length];
        int index=0;
        boolean found = false;
        for(int j=0;j<list.length;j++) {
            Employee emp = list[j];
            if(emp.getIdNumber().equals(search)) {
                System.out.println("Found id : "+ search+" at index :"+j);
                emps[index++] = emp;
                found=true;
            }
        }
        if(!found) {
            System.out.println("No record has been found for the id number: " + search);
        }
        return emps;
    }