Arrays and objects....

[Kate ryan]

Hey,
I'm trying to write a program which reads in a sequence of lines, containing a name and telephone number and sorts it into an alphabetically ordered telephone directory. I was just wondering if anyone would be able to tell me how I could read in an unlimited amount of input...??
Thanks in advance...

[Steven Bell]

Well, you can't just read in an unlimited amount of input. There are system and memory limitations depending on what you are running on. What you could do is read in a certain amount, process it, save it, and then get the next chunk.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Instead of using an array, which has to be allocated at a specific, fixed size, you can use a List (for example, java.util.ArrayList) which grows as needed. In JDK 1.5:

ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.add("One");
list.add("Two");
list.add("Three");
System.out.println(list.size()); // prints "3"
for (int i = 0; i<list.size(); ++i) {
    String s = list.get(i);
    System.out.println(s);
}