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Java Java Data Structures Getting There Type Casting

Eric Shelby
Eric Shelby
28,300 Points

Type Casting problems

I'm having trouble understand this question. "The method getTitleFromObject will be called and passed a String and/or a com.example.BlogPost. For this first task, return the object obj type casted as a String if it is in fact a String." Does it simply want me to somehow add obj to the result variable and return that? Does it want me to use a method from BlogPost.java? I have no idea what I'm doing.

com/example/BlogPost.java
package com.example;

import java.util.Date;

public class BlogPost {
    private String mAuthor;
    private String mTitle;
    private String mBody;
    private String mCategory;
    private Date mCreationDate;

    public BlogPost(String author, String title, String body, String category, Date creationDate) {
      mAuthor = author;
      mTitle = title;
      mBody = body;
      mCategory = category;
      mCreationDate = creationDate;
    }

    public String getAuthor() {
      return mAuthor;
    }

    public String getTitle() {
      return mTitle;
    }

    public String getBody() {
      return mBody;
    }

    public String getCategory() {
      return mCategory;
    }

    public Date getCreationDate() {
      return mCreationDate;
    }
}
TypeCastChecker.java
import com.example.BlogPost;

public class TypeCastChecker {
  /***************
  I have provided 2 hints for this challenge.
  Change `false` to `true` in one line below, then click the "Check work" button to see the hint.
  NOTE: You must set all the hints to false to complete the exercise.
  ****************/
  public static boolean HINT_1_ENABLED = false;
  public static boolean HINT_2_ENABLED = false;

  public static String getTitleFromObject(Object obj) {
    // Fix this result variable to be the correct string.
    String result = "";
    if (obj instanceof String == true) {
      obj = result;
    }
    return result;
  }
}

2 Answers

You are nearly correct except for your condition and also inside the if statement of the getTitleFromObject method you have not typecast obj as a string and not assign it to result.

This will make result's type a String, which will then be returned as a string as the method requires. Here is my fix:

if(obj instanceof String) { result = (String) obj; }

Keep all other code the same.

if(obj instanceof String) {
    result = (String) obj;
}

Just wanted to add the code formatted.

Eric Shelby
Eric Shelby
28,300 Points

Thanks for your answer. It cleared things up.