Searching for a String in an Array and returning the position

Question

Hi I'm a complete newbie on programming and I try to search for a certain String in an array. When it's found the method should return the index but if the String is not found it should return -1.

public int poitionOfWord(String testWord) {
    for (int i = 0; i < wordArray.length; i++) {
        if (wordArray[i].equals(testWord)) {
            return i;
        }
    }
    return -1;
}

would this method return always -1 or would it actually terminate when finding a word and would return i.

Answer 1

Your method is correct and it will return the index in case it finds a match else if it doesn't find the match, it will come out of loop and return -1.

Just to make code crisp and concise, you can use something like this,

public static String[] wordArray = new String[]{"a", "b"};
public static int poitionOfWord(String testWord) {
    return Arrays.asList(wordArray).indexOf(testWord);
}

Then test it with some code,

public static void main(String args[]) {
    System.out.println(poitionOfWord("a"));
    System.out.println(poitionOfWord("z"));
}

This prints,

1
-1

Answer 2

通常，当函数到达return语句时，它将终止并返回给定值。