ArrayList drops the first element

Question

I hate asking for help, but this has me confused.
I have a code that outputs the elements of an arraylist as text strings to a file. For some reason, the first element of the ArrayList gets dropped, but every other element after gets saved to text perfectly.
public void writeOut(ArrayList a)throws IOException{
    String[] out=new  String[a.size()];
    for(int i=0;i<out.length;i++){
        out=a.get(i).toString();
System.out.println("" + out[i]); //test line to see if element has been moved
I have also tried:
public void writeOut(ArrayList a)throws IOException{
    String[] out=new  String[a.size()];
    for(int i=0;i<out.length;i++){
        out=(String)a.get(i);
System.out.println("" + out[i]); //test line to see if element has been moved
The code is straight forward, the best I can tell...so what am I overlooking? I am assuming that my array needs to be primed or something first. I suppose I could make the array one bigger and put some bogus value in the first element...That doesn't really seem the right way to do it though.

Answer 1

I didn't notice it either until I tried to pass it an ArrayList with only one string....I must be having a problem where the ArrayList is being created then.
And that is exactly where the problem was... :sigh:
Thanks for checking that for me.