I want to use the variable that is taken from the inputString() method into the countWords() method below, but I unfortunately run into errors when I try using the latter in the main() method. How do I work around this?

import java.util.*;

public class WordCounter {
    public static String inputString(){
        Scanner s = new Scanner(System.in);
        System.out.println("\nInput your desired sentence/string: ");
        String userInput = s.nextLine();
        return userInput;
    }

    public static void countWords(int count, String userInput){

        count = 1;

        for (int i = 0; i < userInput.length() - 1; i  )
        {
            if ((userInput.charAt(i) == ' ') && (userInput.charAt(i   1) != ' '))
            {
                count  ;
            }
        }
        System.out.print("Number of words in the sentence/string: "   count);    
    }

    public static void main (String [] args){
        System.out.println("Word Counter.");
        inputString();
        countWords();
    }
}

CodePudding user response：

1. Capture the return value coming from your inputString method.
2. Pass that returned value to your countWords method.

Change this:

inputString();
countWords();

… to this:

String input = inputString();
countWords( input );

And it looks like count in countWords is supposed to be the result. So that should be returned to the calling method.

String input = WordCounter.inputString();
int count = WordCounter.countWords( input );

And alter your countWords to return that value. Change the declared return type from void to int. Add a return line at the end.

public static int countWords(int count, String userInput){
    … 
    return count ;  
}

Looking at the bigger picture, try to avoid static as a student learning object-oriented programming.

Create multiple classes, where each class has one main responsibility. If we look at your business problem, we have three responsibilities:

• Business logic
• Interacting with user on the console.
• An app to run the show, with its main method.

And, by the way, the char type has been essentially broken since Java 2, and legacy since Java 5. As a 16-bit value, it is physically incapable of representing most characters.

Instead, to work with individual characters, use code point integer numbers.

CodePudding user response：

This way your code should work

import java.util.Scanner;

public class WordCounter {

public static String inputString(){
    Scanner s = new Scanner(System.in);
    System.out.println("\nInput your desired sentence/string: ");
    String userInput = s.nextLine();
    return userInput;
}

public static void countWords(int count, String userInput){

    count = 1;

    for (int i = 0; i < userInput.length() - 1; i  )
    {
        if ((userInput.charAt(i) == ' ') && (userInput.charAt(i   1) != ' '))
        {
            count  ;
        }
    }
    System.out.print("Number of words in the sentence/string: "   count);
}

public static void main (String [] args){
    System.out.println("Word Counter.");
    String input = inputString();
    countWords(0, input);
}

}