Binary file compare

Question

I'm sorry. I didn't want to have to post here, but I've been banging my head on this all week. Hopefully somebody here can shed some light on this for me.
I'm trying to write an application that compares a series of binary files in a user-defined order. The user needs to be able to specify the type of change that has occured ( > < = !, and numerical searches) for a given byte. (I am also supporting WORD/DWORD, but it's the same principal) To clarify, imagine:
Byte at given offset: (((fileA < fileB) = fileC) != fileD) ...
Now, my original code worked, but it was extremely poor. It had two methods fullCompare() and partialCompare(), it read data directly from the DataInputStream, and used skipBytes() to pass over bytes that had been excluded from a previous search. I kept thinking "There has to be a better way to do this." So I made it as simple as possible! I created an inner class called BinaryFile. BinaryFile reads the data (using getUnsignedByte() getByte() getUnsignedShort() getShort() etc... depending on the user's option.
I created two instances of this class... One I call 'result' and the other 'bin' the files are read in by the constructor and stored in an ArrayList<Integer> (later I cast my Shorts to int)
Now, 'result' holds the first file opened, and bin holds each additional file, ex:
BinaryFile result = new BinaryFile("C:\\test1.bin", BinaryFile.UNSIGNED_WORD);
All of this works�. OK, so now I run my first compare:
compare(new BinaryFile("C:\\test2.bin", BinaryFile.UNSIGNED_BYTE), GREATER_THAN);
again, everything works like a champ.. now to actually compare the files, I do this:
public void compare(BinaryFile bin, int compareType) {
for (int count=0; count < results.values.size(); count++) {
if (results.values.get(count) != null) {
switch (compareType) {
case GREATER_THAN:
if (bin.values.get(count) > results.values.get(count))
results.values.set(count, bin.values.get(count));
else
results.values.set(count, null);
break;
                    ����������..
Now, it works for the FIRST two files that I compare, but after that it's like it started setting null when it wasn't supposed to�. I know that nobody probably read this far, but somebody please help me, this is killing me.

Answer 1

I posted that at some unruly hour of the morning, while tired and frustrated... I had a flight from Korea to Japan today and spent the entire trip reading J2SE 5 docs about collections and generics, etc... So I'm going to give this one more go-round before I ask for help. I hate being beaten by a machine, asking for help makes me feel like I lost!
Thanks