File scaning help

[bondo]

I'm working on a program where I'm reading a file and I have to count the number of entries in the file. Each entry takes up a different number of lines, but each entry is also separated by a '#'. I'm wanting to read through the file and count the number of '#' marks first before I do anything, but I can't figure out how exactly to do it.

Here is what I have so far, and I keep getting an "incompatible types" error because i'm checking for characters and apparently # isn't a character, or i'm just doing something totally wrong. Is there some method I need to be calling to do this or what? I'm stuck, lol, HELP!!!

public static int scanFile(String test)throws IOException
    {
        char mark = "#";
        int count=0;
        Scanner fin = new Scanner(new File(test));
        
        while(fin.hasNext())
        {
            String line = fin.nextLine();
            for(int x=0; x<line.length(); x++)
            {
                if(line.charAt(x) == mark)
                    count ++;
            }//end for    
        }//end while
        return count;
        
    }//end scanFile

I can make it work just fine if I count the number of lines in the file, just not for counting the #... I'm not really looking for an ANSWER, just maybe a tip, or point out something I'm overlooking.

[peter_budo]

This is not very good practice line.charAt(x) == mark you should use Character methods compareTo() which return integer

the value 0 if the argument Character is equal to this Character; a value less than 0 if this Character is numerically less than the Character argument; and a value greater than 0 if this Character is numerically greater than the Character argument (unsigned comparison). Note that this is strictly a numerical comparison; it is not locale-dependent.

or you can use method equals() which return boolean

true if the objects are the same; false otherwise.

More info can be found in Charecter class API documentation here

[bondo]

actually, the comparing part wasn't the problem. It was not being able to compare the char type variable with the "#" that was assigned to the mark variable because of incompatible types...

Now that i've sat here messing with this for god knows how long, i look at the thing and I go... "Why is it telling me that the mark variable is a string?" Then I look at what I assigned it, ("#") and i go... oh yeah... double quotes IS a string. single quotes is a char. So then I felt really stupid for even posting this in the first place.... lol. I just changed

char mark = "#";

to

char mark = '#';

and everything worked just fine... LOL! I'm so dumb, haha. Always overlooking the obvious. Oh well.

[iamthwee]

You could have done something similar using the substring method to isolate each character.