Every thing in my code seems to be perfect. I'm suspicious of the 'return count' text, I get 1 match instead of 2.

Question

Please help

ScrabblePlayer.java

public class ScrabblePlayer {
  private String mHand;

  public ScrabblePlayer() {
    mHand = "";
  }

  public String getHand() {
   return mHand;
  }

  public void addTile(char tile) {
    // Adds the tile to the hand of the player
    mHand += tile;
  }

  public boolean hasTile(char tile) {
   return mHand.indexOf(tile) > -1;
  }

  public int getTileCount (char tile) {
    int count = 0;
    for (char x: mHand.toCharArray())      
    { if (mHand.indexOf(tile)>-1)
      {
        count++;
      return count;
      }
    }
  return count;
  }
}

Answer 1 · 2015-06-11T05:47:23Z

June 11, 2015 5:47am

indexOf will return the position of a character in a string. Because of this, if tile happens to exist in mHand then every single iteration will result in the if conditional passing even if there was only one occurrence in mHand.

The reason you'd get 1 as the count was, as you suspected, the inner return statement. When you hit a return statement you immediately exit the method so count would never be able to exceed 1.

So in order to check for the count of how many times a tile occurs we can do the following:

Iterate through all the characters in mHand as you were doing.
Check for equality against tile and the current character (x in the case of your original code).
Increment count if they are equal.
Return count after completely iterating through mHand.

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MacLorand Mushiva

MacLorand Mushiva

Every thing in my code seems to be perfect. I'm suspicious of the 'return count' text, I get 1 match instead of 2.

1 Answer

Dan Johnson

Dan Johnson