Thread: Searching issues.

Back again! This program is supposed to search through an array of people and find who you're looking for based on a string given that can be their name, email, relation, birthday, or phone number. What I have come up on is that I used the exact same code for my findByName method (Which works fine) as I did for my findByEmail method, except I changed a couple of things to make it find the email and not the name. However, no matter what email I put in the string, it comes up as not finding it. Maybe you can see why? Here are my 2 classes:

public class Contact
{
   private String name, relation, bday, phone, email;
 
   public Contact(String n, String r, String bd, String p, String e)
   {
       name = n;
       relation = r;
       bday = bd;
       phone = p;
       email = e;
    }
 
    public String getName()
    {
        return name;
    }
 
        public String getRelation()
    {
        return relation;
    }
 
        public String getBday()
    {
        return bday;
    }
 
        public String getPhone()
    {
        return phone;
    }
 
         public String getEmail()
    {
        return email;
    }
 
    public String toString()
    {
        return name + "  " + relation + "  " + bday + "  " + phone + "  " + email;
    }
}

public class TestContact
{
 
    public static void printContacts(List<Contact> a)
    {
        System.out.println("                  Contact List     ");
        System.out.println();  
        System.out.println("   Name           Relation         Birthday         Phone        Email");
        System.out.println("----------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
        for(Contact v : a)
        {
            System.out.println(v);
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
 
    public static void findByName(List<Contact> a, String s)
    {
        int top = a.size();
        int bottom = -1;
        int probe;
 
        System.out.println("Find Name - " + s);
        while (top - bottom > 1)
        {
            probe = (top + bottom) / 2;
            Contact g = a.get(probe);
            if(g.getName().compareTo(s) > 0)
             top = probe;
             else 
             bottom = probe;
            }
            Contact bg = a.get(bottom);
            if ((bottom >= 0) && (bg.getName().compareTo(s) == 0))
            System.out.println("Found: " + bg);
 
            else
            System.out.println("There was no " + s + "found");
 
        }
 
        public static void findByEmail(List<Contact> a, String s)
        {
          int top = a.size();
          int bottom = -1;
           int probe;
 
          System.out.println("Find Email - " + s);
           while (top - bottom > 1)
          {
            probe = (top + bottom) / 2;
            Contact g = a.get(probe);
            if(g.getEmail().compareTo(s) > 0)
             top = probe;
             else 
             bottom = probe;
            }
            Contact bg = a.get(bottom);
            if ((bottom >= 0) && (bg.getEmail().compareTo(s) == 0))
            System.out.println("Found: " + bg);
 
            else
            System.out.println("There was no " + s + " found");
        }
 
 
    public static void main(String [] args)
    {
        List<Contact> myContacts = new ArrayList<Contact>();
 
        myContacts.add(new Contact("John Carter", "brother", "Mar 3", "(342)555-7069", "jcarter@carter.com"));
        myContacts.add(new Contact("Elise Carter", "mom", "Apr 19", "(342)555-7011", "carterMom@carter.com"));
        myContacts.add(new Contact("Ellie Carter", "me", "Jun 10", "(342)555-8102", "ecarter@carter.com"));
        myContacts.add(new Contact("Sue Ellen", "friend", "Mar 9", "(341)555-9182", "susieE@hotmail.com"));
        myContacts.add(new Contact("Frank Carter", "dad", "Dec 1", "(342)555-7011", "carterDad@carter.com"));
        myContacts.add(new Contact("Johnnie", "friend", "Jan 21", "(341)555-7789", "jDawg5555@yahoo.com"));
 
        printContacts(myContacts);
        findByName(myContacts, "Johnnie");
 
        findByEmail(myContacts, "jcarter@carter.com");
        System.out.println();
 
 
    }
 
}

The code in both findByName and findByEmail have some issues. For instance if you were to use: findByName(myContacts, "John Carter");, the contact would not be found. Basically your method does not check every contact which can be seen if you place System.out.println(g.getName()); right after Contact g = a.get(probe);. Doing that will allow you to see which contacts the loop is checking/skipping. Since you used an enhance for loop in the printContacts method already, I will suggest you use the same approach in findByName and findByEmail instead of the while loop. Here is an example of how to get out of an enhanced for loop once a condition is met:

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int[] intArray = {5,6,7,8,9,1,0,5,3};
        boolean found = false;
 
        for(int i : intArray) {
            if(i == 0) {
                found = true;
                System.out.println("0 was found in the array");
                break; //This will break out of the for loop and move on to the next bit of code
            }
        }
        if(found == false) { // In case the for loop didn't find the integer
            System.out.println("0 was not found in the array");
        }
    }
}

Of course this uses an array and not a List, which would give some more options, but I think it will suffice.

Tried it out and it works great! Thanks a ton!