Thread: Printing an ArrayList of user-defined Objects

What you're seeing is the output from Object.toString() - read the API documentation for the method, and then override it in your own classes. Writing toString() methods for my classes is one of my favourite Java programming activities: it's like putting the cherry on the cake.

Glancing at your code again, you may have more problems than that. If you have a list of Employee, or even a list of lists of Employee, all you should need to do is to implement Employee.toString() and then:

List<List<Employee>> listOfListsOfEmployees = makeWeirdEmployeeListOfLists();
System.out.println(listOfListsOfEmployees)

List.toString will iterate over its members invoking toString() on each, concatenate all the return values nicely and return it.

Hi there! I did have a.toString() method, but I found that I needed the original.toString() method from Arrays.toString(), so I ended up just calling my .tostring() method printerstring.

For some reason when i called Arrays.toString() while my Employee.toString() method existed, it produced a different result, like I had somehow edited Arrays.toString() by creating Employee.toString(). I changed my Employee.toString() method to Employee.printerString();

-EDIT-
typos

-EDIT 2-
I ended up just messing around with my loadEmployees() method and my Employee.create method, cleaned it up and it ended up working. Here is the (semi-)finished code:

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public class MyClass
{
  public static void main (String [] args)
  {
    ArrayList<Employee> list = loadEmployees();
    for (int i=0;i<list.size();i++)
    {
      System.out.println(list.get(i).printerString());
    }
  }
 
  public static void processEmployees() 
  { 
    ArrayList<Employee> employees = loadEmployees();  
    printEmployees(employees); 
  }
 
  @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
  static ArrayList loadEmployees()
  {
    ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
    ArrayList<Employee> employees = new ArrayList<Employee>();
    BufferedReader br = null;
    String [] strArr, arr = new String[5];
    String line;
    int count = 0;
    try
    {
 
      br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("MyFilePath"));
      strArr = new String[10];
      while ((line = br.readLine()) != null)
      {
        strArr = line.split("\\s+");
        employees.add(0, Employee.create(strArr));  //just added this part in, rather than that messy forloop
        count++;
      }
    }
    catch(Exception e){ System.out.println(e.getMessage()); }
 
    return employees;
  }
}
 
class Employee
{
  String name, company, projectName, projectPosition;
  private Employee(String name, String company, String projectName, String projectPosition)
  {
    this.name = name;
    this.company = company;
    this.projectName = projectName;
    this.projectPosition = projectPosition;
  }
 
  public String printerString()
  {
    String str = "Name: " + name + "\nCompany: " + company + "\nProject Name: " + projectName + "\nProject Position: " + projectPosition + "\n";
    return str;
  }
 
  public static Employee create(String[] str) //changed this method
  {
    return new Employee(str[1], str[2], str[3], str[4]);
  }
}