Again on "call to this must be first statement in constructor"

Question

Hi, I've spent the last hour reading tons of docs & threads about the "call to this must be first statement in constructor" problem, but I still cannot work it out.
Here is the code
     public Orologio(String s)
          StringTokenizer exploder=new StringTokenizer(s,":",false);
          this(Integer.parseInt(exploder.nextToken()),Integer.parseInt(exploder.nextToken()));
          }Well, I know this..() must be the first line in the method, but I need to parse my input string before passing the parameters to the Orologio(int,int) constructor!
Thankyou!

Answer 1

You could define an initialization method:private void init(int a, int b) {
    ... your initialization code that was in your constructor...
public Orologio(String s) {
    StringTokenizer exploder=new StringTokenizer(s,":",false);
    init(Integer.parseInt(exploder.nextToken()),Integer.parseInt(exploder.nextToken()));
public Orlogio(int a, int b) {
    init(a, b);
}However, make sure it is the responsability of this class to handle String as constructor parameter. Maybe you should force the client to tokenize the string and provide integer values to the constructor (and then get rid of the Orologio(String s) constructor.)