Develop Reference

How to check if String contains values from an array

I am fairly new to Java and was trying to make a username check for profanities.
I have made an Array with 4 profanities and now I wanted to check the user's input for the bad words, however, I don't know how to form the if statement to check all items from the array.
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner character = new Scanner(System.in);
String[] profanities = {"asshole", "ass", "idiot", "stupid"};
System.out.println("What is your name");
String userName = character.next();
if (userName.contains(profanities[])) { //This Part is what i dont understand
System.out.println("Invalid name");
}
else {
System.out.println("Valid Name!");
}
}

Use a Set instead of an ArrayList and then profanities.contains(userName). Mind you, the user should have inputted the exact profanity as in the profanities Set, in order for the if statement to evaluate to true. If the user inputs something like 'userjackass', it will not be classed as profanity.

Without the need of creating further Collections, just your original array. As the set of invalid names would be previously set/known, the sort operation could only be performed once, when the program is started.
Once sorted, just call binarySearch on it for every input:
Arrays.sort(profanities); //--> if profanities is a static set, call this just once.
if (Arrays.binarySearch(profanities,username)>=0)
System.out.println("Invalid name");
else
System.out.println("Valid Name!");
//binarySearch will return >=0 if the value is found
This avoids the creation of sets, lists, or the implementation of loops.
If the set of invalid names may change (adding new ones, for example), this would require a second sort operation. In this scenario, the other answers provided would be a better approach. Use this method if the invalid names set is known and won't be altered during your program's execution.

I would do it like this..
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Profanities {
public static void main(String[] args) {
boolean allow = false;
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
String[] profanity_list = {"asshole", "ass", "idiot", "stupid"};
String test_input = "";
// do while until allow equals true..
while (!allow) {
System.out.println("What is your name?");
test_input = scan.nextLine();
byte memory = 0;
// compare the input with the elements of the array..
for (int pos = 0; pos < profanity_list.length; pos++) {
if (test_input.contains(profanity_list[pos]) == true) {
System.out.println("Invalid name. Let's start again..");
memory = 1;
break;
}
}
// if memory equals 1, it means that a profanity was found..
if(memory == 0){allow = true;}
}
String name = test_input;
System.out.println("That is a valid name. Thanks.");
}
}

Instead of using Array of String, use List of String from which you can easily use contains method. I modified you're code with List, refer below
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner character = new Scanner(System.in);
//String[] profanities = {"asshole", "ass", "idiot", "stupid"};
ArrayList<String> profanities = new ArrayList<String>();
profanities.add("asshole");
profanities.add("ass");
System.out.println("What is your name");
String userName = character.next();
if (profanities.contains(userName)) { //This Part is what i dont understand
System.out.println("Invalid name");
}
else {
System.out.println("Valid Name!");
}
}
One more advantage of using List is, it's dynamic, you can add elements to it in future without any issues

Try:
for(String string : profanities)
if(userName.contains(string))System.out.println("invalid name");
else System.out.println("valid name");
Note: the for loop iterates through every entry in the array and checks to see if the entry is contained within userName

Convert array element to a string and print first character?

I need to create an array of strings from user input and print the first letter of each element. I'm aware that I need to convert the array to a string somehow, but unsure how to accomplish this. I was unsuccessful with Arrays.toString
Following is my code:
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.util.Arrays;
class Main{
public static void main(String[] args){
Scanner inp = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("How many names would you like to enter in this array?: ");
int numName = inp.nextInt();
String nameArray[] = new String[numName];
System.out.println("Enter the names: ");
for(int i = 0; i <= nameArray.length; i++){
nameArray[i] = inp.nextLine();
}
System.out.println(nameArray.charAt(0));
}
}

You need to iterate over every String in the Array and then print the first char. You can do this using charAt() and a loop.
for(String str : nameArray) {
System.out.println(str.charAt(0));
}
Or you can use Arrays.stream():
Arrays.stream(nameArray).forEach(e -> System.out.println(e.charAt(0)));
Also just a few problems with your code:
You are going to enter into this problem, because nextInt() does not consume the newline. Add a blank nextLine() call after nextInt()
You are looping until <= array.length which will cause an indexOutOfBounds error. You need to only loop until less than array.length

Just do another iteration over the "nameArray", and get the first character of each array element, and print it.
For example, you can use for-each:
for(String name : nameArray) {
System.out.println(name.charAt(0));
}

Arrays.stream(nameArray).map(s -> s.charAt(0)).forEach(System.out::println);

How to make java scanner accept more than one string input?

Hello i'm currently a beginner in Java. The code below is a while loop that will keep executing until the user inputs something other than "yes". Is there a way to make the scanner accept more than one answer? E.g. yes,y,sure,test1,test2 etc.
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
String ans = "yes";
while (ans.equals("yes"))
{
System.out.print("Test ");
ans = in.nextLine();
}
}
}

Use the or operator in your expression
while (ans.equals("yes") || ans.equals("sure") || ans.equals("test1"))
{
System.out.print("Test ");
ans = in.nextLine();
}
But if you are going to include many more options, it's better to provide a method that takes the input as argument, evaluates and returns True if the input is accepted.

Don't compare the user input against a value as loop condition?!
Respectively: change that loop condition to something like
while(! ans.trim().isEmpty()) {
In other words: keep looping while the user enters anything (so the loop stops when the user just hits enter).

You are looking for a method to check whether a given string is included in a List of string values. There are different ways to achieve this, one would be the use of the ArrayList contains() method to check whether your userinput in appears in a List of i.e. 'positive' answers you've defined.
Using ArrayList, your code could look like this:
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) {
ArrayList<String> positiveAnswers = new ArrayList<String>();
positiveAnswers.add("yes");
positiveAnswers.add("sure");
positiveAnswers.add("y");
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
String ans = "yes";
while (positiveAnswers.contains(ans))
{
System.out.print("Test ");
ans = in.nextLine();
}
}
}

Accumulate Strings in Loop and Print Out all of them

I am trying to figure out how to accumulate user inputs in for loop and then to print them out with one system.out.print. This is my test code for the problem.
So for example if a user type : Mike for his name and Joe,Jack,Dave for other names, how to print them all just having one variable because amount of variables are not known since a user has that decision. Also is it possible to do that without stringbuilder and without arrays?
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Accumulate {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String othernames = " ",name;
int count,n;
Scanner kybrd = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("Enter your name ");
name = kybrd.nextLine();
System.out.println("How many other names would you like to add ? ");
count = kybrd.nextInt();
kybrd.nextLine();
for(n=0;n<count;++n){
System.out.println("Enter other names ");
othernames = kybrd.nextLine();
}
System.out.println("Other names are "+othernames + " And your name is "+ name);
}
}

You can call it recursively, for instance:
Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
String s;
while(condition) {
s = s + sc.nextLine();
}
this will always concat the lines you enter, you can also add commas, or spaces, or whatever you want to add.

as for your question about using Objects other than StringBuilder you can use List<String> and build a string for it at the final step.
you can use Map<String, String> if you need more complex data structure.

Read multiple lines from console and store it in array list in Java?

Can anyone please help me with the code as how to read multiple lines from console and store it in array list?
Example, my input from the console is:
12 abc place1
13 xyz place2
and I need this data in ArrayList.
So far I tried this code:
Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
ArrayList informationList = new ArrayList<ArrayList>();
String information = "";
int blockSize = 0, count = 1;
System.out.println("Enter block size");
blockSize = scanner.nextInt();
System.out.println("Enter the Information ");
while (scanner.hasNext() && blockSize >= count) {
scanner.useDelimiter("\t");
information = scanner.nextLine();
informationList.add(information);
count++;
}
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Input line from console is mix of string and integer

You've got a few problems.
First of all, the initialization line for your ArrayList is wrong. If you want a list of Object so you can hold both Integers and Strings, you need to put Object inside the angle braces. Also, you're best off adding the generic type argument to the variable definition instead of just on the object instantiation.
Next, your count is getting messed up because you're initializing it to 1 instead of 0. I'm assuming "block size" really means the number of rows here. If that's wrong leave a comment.
Next, you don't want to reset the delimiter your Scanner is using, and you certainly don't want to do it inside your loop. By default a Scanner will break up tokens based on any whitespace which I think is what you want since your data is delimited both by tabs and newlines.
Also, you don't need to check hasNext() in your while condition. All of the next*() methods will block waiting for input so the call to hasNext() is unnecessary.
Finally, you're not really leveraging the Scanner to do what it does best which is parse tokens into whatever type you want. I'm assuming here that every data line is going to start with a single integer and the be followed by two strings. If that's the case, just make a call to nextInt() followed by two calls to next() inside your loop and you'll get all the data parsed out into the data types you need automatically.
To summarize, here is your code updated with all my suggestions as well as some other bits to get it to run:
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Example {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
ArrayList<Object> list = new ArrayList<>();
System.out.println("Enter block size");
int blockSize = scanner.nextInt();
System.out.println("Enter data rows:");
int count = 0;
while (count < blockSize) {
list.add(scanner.nextInt());
list.add(scanner.next());
list.add(scanner.next());
count++;
}
System.out.println("\nThe data you entered is:");
System.out.println(list);
}
}