I dont understand this task, help

Hi Marius,

You want to use the parameter lastName that is passed in. You're concerned about it's first letter so you can use .charAt(0) to isolate that.

Once you have the first letter, you need to test if it is 'M' or less. If it is, set the line variable to be 1. Else, set it to 2.

Then return line. That could look something like:

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant {

  public int getLineFor(String lastName) {
    /* If the last name is between A thru M send them to line 1
       Otherwise send them to line 2 */
    int line = 0;
    if(lastName.charAt(0) <= 'M'){
      line = 1;
    } else {
      line = 2;
    }
    return line;
  }
}

I hope that helps.

Steve.

You are almost there! You are just overcomplicating things a little. You don't need to declare a Boolean at all in order to do this, you just need a simple if statement that compares the first character of your lastName string to the values A and M. One big important thing to know though is that return has to be the last line in the function and your variable value has to be set before you do anything.

public class ConferenceRegistrationAssistant {

  public int getLineFor(String lastName) {
    /* If the last name is between A thru M send them to line 1
       Otherwise send them to line 2 */
    int line = 0;
    if (lastName.charAt(0) >= 'A' && lastName.charAt(0) <= 'M') {
      line = 1;
    } else {
      line = 2;
    }
    return line;
  }

}