I'm very new to Java and I was looking for some help on this particular problem.

I need to create a method that takes a String as a parameter and returns "true" if the parameter is the letter Y or the letter N (in either upper or lower case), or false otherwise.

Most of the methods we've been working on are numbers (integers mostly) not strings, so this one confuses me quite a bit. How do you make the computer look for a certain character like y, Y, n, N. I don't want to declare them as variables, I just want Java to see them as letters.

I have:

I think a switch case is the best method, but I'm missing something about naming because all my compiling errors are telling me that I have incompatible types (i.e. found: boolean, required: int).

Thank you in advance for any help.

i don't quite understand the problem... If you were to declare str as a char instead of a string (since you are expecting only 1 letter). You could place it in the switch statement directly.
A switch statement is based on an integer, which a boolean is as well, false is 0 and true is 1.

all of your lines which assign the variable character, will not do anything, since the value of character needs to be determined before ever entering the switch statement, as well the variables scope ends after the return statement, making the assignment useless. You also do not require the break statements inside of the switch, in most cases they are necessary, but since you are returning a value in all cases, the break statement of each case is never reached, and unnecessary.

You could always use String's charAt method to get the first character from the string.

Like this:

Well let me confuse you a little bit more. Because Strings are Objects, they have methods that will allow you to do this checking that you want.

The one method that will do you wonders in this case is the equalsIgnoreCase() method. You can check it out in the Java api yourself if you want:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/ja...ang/String.html

Because this method already returns a boolean value, you can use it directly in your return statement.

This may come off as a little confusing initially, but just bear with it:


When the code:
str.equalsIgnoreCase("y")
is called, it is comparing whatever value you have in the variable str, and it is trying to determine if it is equal to "y" or "Y". If neither of these are correct, then the statement after the or operator (this thing -> ||) is read:
str.equalsIgnoreCase("n")
in the same way, this code determines whether the value in str is either "n" or "N".

Because both of these values return a boolean as a result, if the value in the variable str is "y", "Y", "n", or "N", then it will automatically return ture. Otherwise, the method will return false.