hasNext() and next(); method

What is the difference between the two methods?

If I had a sentence and I wanted to scan it; "what is the difference" - I would probably assign the variable to sentence.next();, I have no idea what hasNext() is for?

Thanks guys as always!!!! (learning a lot about java from here :biggrin:

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Reply 1

Baron

Are these the methods of Iterator?

hasNext() tells you if there are any more elements.
next() iterates to the next element and returns it.

When you use an iterator to loop though a collection it is usually like this:


while(iter.hasNext())
{
      Sausage s = (Sausage)iter.next()
}

This is what it would be like if you were iterating through a collection of Sausage objects. If the iterator uses generics you use generics you wouldn't need to cast.

Reply 2

DiablosDevil

I presume you mean of the Iterator class? Again if you ask questions about methods say which class they are of as we can only guess what your after. Like I also said last I answered this type of question for you, the answers are in the API. You should keep it bookmarked.

hasNext() - "Returns true if the iteration has more elements"
So you can check if there are more objects you can get from the iterator, and if there are it returns true. If there are no more objects it will return false.

next() - "Returns the next element in the iteration"
So if there is a next item, it will be returned. If there isn't it'll throw a 'NoSuchElementException', but if you use iterators properly you should never encounter it.

Essentially you check if there is a variable a next variable with hasNext(), and if so, you get it with next(). Otherwise how else will you know if you are at the end of the list of objects? The two methods are usually used together where instead of using a for loop you can use a while loop, like so:

Iterator<Object> iterator = list.iterator();
Object myObject;
while (iterator.hasNext()) {
    myObject = iterator.next();
    // do something with myObject
}

In the while loop above I am first checking if the iterator has a next element, and if it does I then store it into a variable and work with it in the while loop. Personally I always prefer for/each loops as it's less code and more straightforward to read. I suspect iterators were a solution to get the functionality of for/each before Java 5. If you don't know them already, I'd recommend researching them next. But you still need to know about iterators.