Problem in java.lang.String.format()

Question

Dear Experts,
I tried to display a double value with leading spaces with the following statements:
double val = 123456789.987654321;
System.out.println( String.format("%17.2f", val));They worked in void main(), but didn't in a method of a class. The following error message was found while compiling:
init:
deps-jar:
Compiling 1 source file to C:\JavaProject\ALC-EJB\build\jar
C:\JavaProject\ALC-EJB\src\java\escis\creditControl\BalanceRecord.java:61: cannot find symbol
symbol  : method format(java.lang.String,double)
location: class java.lang.String
        System.out.println( String.format("%17.2f", val));
1 error
C:\JavaProject\ALC-EJB\nbproject\build-impl.xml:223: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\JavaProject\ALC-EJB\nbproject\build-impl.xml:109: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details.
BUILD FAILED (total time: 2 seconds)I've read the mentioned file (build-impl.xml) but still got no idea what happened.
Line 109:
<javac srcdir="@{srcdir}" destdir="@{destdir}" debug="@{debug}" deprecation="${javac.deprecation}" source="${javac.source}" target="${javac.target}" includeantruntime="false">Line 223:
<ejbjarproject2:javac>I'm using NetBeans IDE 4.1. Could you please give me a hand? Thank you very much

Answer 1

Not sure if this has got anything to do with it, but
the format() method was added to String in Java 5.0.
Maybe you are using an older version in that second
case?You're right. It works when I've changed it from 1.4 (default) to 1.5. Thank you very much.