Thread: Illegal start of expression? // begginer

Good day

I can't figure out why the complier is giving the following error message "illegal start of expression" once it reach the countSpaces method.
The way I see it (and I am obviously seeing it wrong), the code is public since why not, int since it returns an int # and the method has return int in it, and static I am not too sure but I get the same error message whether or not it is included

Any indications of why this is occuring would be appreciated!

Thanks

Chris

   public static void main (String args[]) {
 
        Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
        String sentence;
 
        System.out.println("type a sentence");
        sentence = in.nextLine();
         countSpaces (sentence);
 
        public static int countSpaces (String test) {
            int counter  = 0;
            for (int i=0 ; i < test.length() ; i++) {
                if (test.charAt(i) ==(' ')) {
                    counter++;
                }
            } 
            return counter;
        }
    }

The main is in itself a method, and you cannot have methods inside methods. You just need to reorganize your brackets:

public static void main (String args[]) {
 
        Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
        String sentence;
 
        System.out.println("type a sentence");
        sentence = in.nextLine();
         countSpaces (sentence);
        }
        public static int countSpaces (String test) {
            int counter  = 0;
            for (int i=0 ; i < test.length() ; i++) {
                if (test.charAt(i) ==(' ')) {
                    counter++;
                }
            } 
            return counter;
        }