Help to search for a string value and return the index in the arraylist

Question

Hello,
I just start java programming for the last three weeks and I cannot find a solution for this problem. I have the following List with string and integer value as shown below:
List<Empl> list= new ArrayList<Empl>();
     list.add(new Empl(1,"Jim", "Balu",88);
     list.add(new Empl(3,"Bob", "Howards",2);
     list.add(new Empl(2,"Chris", "Hup",8);
I have no problem of sorting this arraylist either by firstname or lastname. However, I cannot think of a way to search for a firstname or lastname and returing the whole row. I do not want to use index since I am asking user to enter the name to search. Here is my code to search for an empl based on index.
System.out.print("Please enter index to search or (q)uit: ");
          String ans = sc.next();
          System.out.println();
          int ians = Integer(ans);
          if (ans.equalsIgnoreCase("q"))
                    choice = "n";
          else
          System.out.println("index " + list.get(ians)); //this will print out the whole row based on the index
Since the user will never seen the contents of the arraylist, is there a way that I can search by string last/first name and will get the index location in int if the result is met?
Please advice and thank you.
Bob.

Answer 1

user11191663 wrote:
Since the user will never seen the contents of the arraylist, is there a way that I can search by string last/first name and will get the index location in int if the result is met?Another possibility is to set up an ArrayList for each thing you want to search on and then every time you add an employee, add the piece of data you want as well, viz:
Empl e = new Empl(1,"Jim", "Balu",88);
list.add(e);
firstNames.add(e.firstName());As long as you always add them in the same order, the indexes will match, so you could do something like
ians = firstNames.indexOf(nameToFind);to return the index of the name, if it's there (if not, it will return -1).
I wouldn't recommend this as standard practise, but it should be OK for the level you're at.
NOTE: indexOf() returns the index of the FIRST matching item. You may want to think about what you want to do if there are more than 1.
Winston