Thread: char manipulation quick question

can i do this and if not what is the appropriate line of code to change the char at position a in sentence to the character at position element in letters

where sentence and letters are two strings
and element is an int.

sentence.charAt(a) = letters.charAt(element)??????????????????????????? ????????

Strings are immutable. Which is a jargon shorthand for saying that an instance of String will not change its characters (think "leopard" and "spots").

There are two ways you can go. One is to build up a new string based on sentence, letters and element. There are lots of methods in the String class that will help. Once you have that newly constructed string you assign it to sentence.

The other way is not to use String at all, but prefer StringBuilder. As you can see from its docs a StringBuilder instance is mutable: ie there are methods provided to alter the characters it contains. If you are altering the contents of a sequence of characters a lot (eg Hangman or similar), StringBuilder might be more useful.