Comparing Strings...weird problem

Question

hello. I have kind of a weird problem going on here. I am attemping to write a java app that will read input from a file character by character and append each character to a String object, halt when it comes to either a whitespace (' '), a newline ('\n'), a tab ('\t'), or the end of the file (-1). Im basically just having the file read in one string at a time. Anywho, when ever i go to compare the string i read in from the file with another string in an if statement, it always comes up false, even when the values are exactly the same. Any ideas of what i might be doing wrong? Here's the code for u java gurus ;).
import java.io.*;
class UpdateHalls
private static String myString;
private static FileReader inFile;
public static void main(String[] args)
try
inFile = new FileReader("test.txt");
myString = new String();
getString();
System.out.println(myString);
if (myString == "this")
System.out.println("it worked");
else
System.out.println("nope");
inFile.close();
catch(IOException ex)
     System.out.println(ex);
private static void getString()
char myChar;
String tempString = new String();
try
myChar = (char)inFile.read();
     while ((myChar != ' ') && (myChar != '\n') && (myChar != '\t') && ((int)myChar != -1))
     tempString = tempString + myChar;
     myChar = (char)inFile.read();
catch(IOException ex)
System.out.println(ex);
myString = tempString;
BTW, the very first word in the file is "this".
Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Another method that you can use is String.compareTo(String)This method returns an int which is 0 only if the two strings are equal... for example
String st1 = "this is a string";
String st2 = "this is another string";
//this won't return 0 because they aren't equal
if(st1.compareTo(st2) == 0) System.out.println("They are equal")
//this will return 0 because they are equal
if(st1.compareTo("this is a string" == 0) System.out.println("They are equal");This isn't neater than .equals() , but it's another way when dealing with strings