Primitive Strings?

Question

Hrmm..... About 2 weeks ago I was posting about maps, and my goal was to basically emulate an associative array.... Anyway, all works fine and well when it's a primitive string (errr..... I'm assuming that's the right term? Hrmmm might just be entirely wrong lol), but when it's a string object, the map maps the value with the object, not a plain string.... So, later when I try to access key X by string X, it's not the same thing since they're different objects.
Anyway, my question is, how do I convert a string object to a primitive string? I'm getting the string from a BufferedReader.readLine() call, and then I'm manipulating it a little before processing the value....
Anyway, thanks to anyone that can help!
(P.S. To the guy who answered my last question on my other thread, if you read this thanks. I forgot about Java for 2 weeks and just not got back into working on something today. I would've said it on that thread, but didn't want to bump it x.x.)

Answer 1

Errrr sorry...... Here's an example (not actual code):
import java.io.*;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.net.*;
import java.util.*;
class Example {
     private Map<String,ActiveUser> Users = Collections.synchronizedMap(new HashMap<String,ActiveUser>());
     private PrintWriter out = null;
     private BufferedReader in = null;
     private Socket oSocket = null;
     private String LastMsg = null;
     public static void Example(String[] args) {
          Example ex = new Example();
     public Example() {
          //pretend in and out are set and bound to a socket.....
          while(true) {
               if((this.LastMsg = this.in.readLine()) != null) { //I don't think the null is the best thing for here, but it seems to work x.x
                    int idx = LastMsg.indexOf(" ");
                    //pretend lines are in the format of "User OtherInfo"
                    if(idx >= 0) {
                         //In my actual script it checks more than if there's a space, since this could obviously cause problems......
                         String user = this.LastMsg.substring(0, idx);
                         String info = this.LastMsg.substring(idx+1);
                         this.Users.put(user, new ActiveUser(info));
                         So this is where things get interesting.....  Later on I get the user name from a different location too....
                         With this other location, the string is read from a file or a different source....
                         If at this point I were to put:
                         this.Users.put("snickers", new ActiveUser(info));
                         it would find the stuff later with .get(), but now it doesn't find it.
                         I can print out user and it will be "snickers" with no spaces or anything around it.
                         This lead me to believe that the problem was that the string as returned by readLine() was perhaps a string object,
                         like user = new String(), and then later, the 'primitive' as I called it string would be a different object, causing the Map to not ifnd it
                         since it compares objects, not string values.
                         The main reason I feel that's what it is is because if I put what I mentioned earlier with the literal "snickers" the code later on works fine.
                         Before you ask, yes, I'm positive user exactly equals "snickers"
class ActiveUser {
     //pretend this does something
}Sorry about the long bit of code x.x.
If you need me to, I can elaborate more, or post my real code (which is quite long..... It's an IRC bot that monitors how long people are in a channel.)