Incompatible Types

[Jyoti Pathak]

Hi,
I am pretty new to this wonderland of Java.Well,my questions is as follows:
Assume that i have defined a String variable:
String myString = "abcd";
Now my goal is to create an arraylist with the same name as that of the value assigned to myString.That is the goal is to achieve:
ArrayList abcd = new ArrayList();
However,when i perform the following i get an error:
ArrayList :myString = new ArrayList();
ERROR is -incompatible types
found : java.util.ArrayList
required: java.lang.String

Can you help me to resolve this issue?
Thanx,
Ritu

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

import java.util.*;
class Test
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        String myString = "abcd";
        ArrayList abcd = new ArrayList();
    }
}  

You must be doing something else with 'abcd' to get this error. My test class doesn't give me any error like that.

[Joel McNary]

Originally posted by Jyoti Pathak:
Hi,

However,when i perform the following i get an error:
ArrayList :myString = new ArrayList();
ERROR is -incompatible types
found : java.util.ArrayList
required: java.lang.String

Can you help me to resolve this issue?

Jyoti:
Is it safe to assume that you are coming to Java from Perl? What you are asking to do is something that is very much along the Perl vein.
In Java, variables are strongly typed. As far as I know, there is nothing in Java that is directly analogous to this feature of Perl. You cannot use the value of one variable as the variable name of another. What you can do is something like the following:

public class Test{
     private java.util.Hashtable aHash = new java.util.Hashtable();
/**Given a String, this will return the ArrayList associated with that String
 */
public static java.util.List getList(String aString){
    java.util.List aList = (java.util.List)aHash.get(aString);
    if(aList == null){
        aList = new java.util.ArrayList();
        aHash.put(aString, aList);
    }
    return aList;
}
public static void main(String[] argv){
    String str1 = "list1";
    String str2 = "list2";
    java.util.List aList;
    //This assigns the list that is "list1" to the aList varaible
    aList = Test.getList(str1);
    //...do something with the list
    aList.add("Hello");
    //This assigns the list that is "list2" to the aList variable
    aList = Test.getList(str2);
    //...do something with the list
    aList.add("World");
    return;
}

Note that there is nothing like:

$str1 = "list1";
$str2 = "list2";
@$str1.add("Hello");
@$str2.add("World");

(It's been quite a while since I've done Perl, and I never did it heavily to begin with; the actual syntax may be slightly different)
Hope that this helps.

[Jyoti Pathak]

Hi Joel,
Thanks a lot for your help..i really appreciate it..well, even i guess i tried to mess perl and java..
Regards,
Jyoti.

[Darryl Burke]

bomn sai,
Your post was moved to a new topic.
Zombie resurrection; unrelated question