List as a return type (Should be easy!?)

Question

Hi all,
I'm pulling my hair out at this as it sounds like it should be easy. The method below should return a List. What am I doing wrong please?
(This is making me feel thick, any help would be very much appreciated)
Thank you,
David.
    public String[] getHrefs(String uriStr) {
          List resultList = new ArrayList();
          HTMLDocument.Iterator it = null;
          Reader rd = null;
          try {
               // Create a reader on the HTML content
               URL url = new URI(uriStr).toURL();
               URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
               rd = new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream());
          } catch (Exception e) {
               System.out.println(e.toString());
          try {
               // Parse the HTML
               EditorKit kit = new HTMLEditorKit();
               HTMLDocument doc = (HTMLDocument) kit.createDefaultDocument();
               doc.putProperty("IgnoreCharsetDirective", new Boolean(true));
               kit.read(rd, doc, 0);
               // Find all the A elements in the HTML document
               it = doc.getIterator(HTML.Tag.A);
          } catch (Exception e) {
               System.out.println(e.toString());
          while ((it != null) && it.isValid()) {
               try {
                    SimpleAttributeSet s = (SimpleAttributeSet) it.getAttributes();
                    if (s != null) {
                         String link = (String) s.getAttribute(HTML.Attribute.HREF);
                         // If link valid, add it to the result list
                         if (link != null)
                              resultList.add(link);
                    it.next();
               } catch (Exception e) {
                    System.out.println(e.toString() + " : Skipping");
                    it.next();
          } // end While
          //     place all found links in array
          resultList.toArray(new String[resultList.size()]);
          // return array
          return resultList;
    }

Answer 1

resultList.toArray(new String[resultList.size()]);In that code, you are not storing the result of the 'toArray()' method which is the array that you wanted. If you look at the API of ArrayList's toArray() method, it said::
Parameters:
a - the array into which the elements of the list are to be stored, if it is big enough; otherwise, a new array of the same runtime type is allocated for this purpose.
Returns:
an array containing the elements of the list.
So the result will not be stored in the array given as the parameter, instead it is stored in resulting array that is returned by the method (regardless of whether or not the parameter array is used). What you want to do is ::
String[] result = resultList.toArray(new String[resultList.size()]);
return result;or as GiddingsR replied, simply:
return resultList.toArray(new String[resultList.size()]);