Something wrong with one of my methods

Question

Hi, im having a little trouble, I have a list of companies which I am storing in an arraylist an this is method below is simply suppose to display how many companies are in each state.
Now, as long as I have the try/catch wrapped around the while loop it seems to function correctly, however if I take it out, the program throws an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException error. However I cannot see where it would be trying to access an index that isnt there.
     public static void compState(ArrayList companyMaker) {
          String[] component = {"WA","NSW","VIC","QLD","SA","ACT","TAS","NT"};
          int[] amount = new int[8];
          int n=0;
          try {
               while (n <= component.length) {
                    System.out.print("\nThe companies in " + component[n] + ": ");
                    for (int i = 0; i < companyMaker.size(); i++) {
                         Company tempComp = (Company) companyMaker.get(i);
                         if (tempComp.getState().equalsIgnoreCase(component[n]))
                              amount[n] += 1;
                    System.out.print(amount[n]);
                    n++;
          catch(Exception e) {}
     }Any help would be great, because I really dont want to leave it the way it is.

Answer 1

i think thats a classical "off by one"-error
you have to be careful with the array.length
if you have an array with 8 elements, array.length would be 8, but the index starts with [0] and therefore ends with [7].
try to replace this line:
while (n <= component.length) with this one:
while (n < component.length)