I Simply Don't Understand the Instructions: How Does the Last Video Help with This?

Hey Ian,

This challenge is kind of a rough introduction to how things change in the Java Track. It's not as straight forward as the other questions by design. Moving forward a lot of challenges are going to require that you think a little more about them, which is good, as it truly helps you understand the concepts that you apply to solve these problems.

So let's break it down, step by step.

1.) we need an array that is obviously supposed to return an int, so we should use that in the method signatures, also, let's pass in the char that we want to check and see if it's contained in our hand.

public int getTileCount(char tile) {
  }

Simple enough.

Now, we want this method to reset it'self each time we use it, so let's set an int value at the top that is set to zero.

public int getTileCount(char tile) {
int count = 0;
  }

So far so good.

Now we've reached a problem. We can use the getHand() to get our hand.. as a String value, which does us very little good for the context of what we find out. Thankfully. toCharArray()

Does this job quite nicely.

Okay, let's set up our loop, remember that we're looping over each char in the array and checking it if it matches the char passed in as an argument and increment our count by one if the values match. Something like below

public int getTileCount(char tile) {
    int count = 0;
    for (char checkedTile : getHand().toCharArray()) {
      if (checkedTile == tile) {
        count++;
      }
    }

  }

That's simple enough, and the final touches are going to be return our count variable and hope that the method has been incrementing it as hoped. it would look below

public int getTileCount(char tile) {
    int count = 0;
    for (char checkedTile : getHand().toCharArray()) {
      if (checkedTile == tile) {
        count++;
      }
    }
    return count;
  }

Thanks hope this helps!