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From: Stuart <DerTopper@web.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: can't return value
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:45:46 +0200
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bilsch wrote in his first posting:
> I want to get variable lastName for use in the main method (the whole
> program isn't shown). I want to return it from inside the IF block within
> the FOR loop.

[snipped various replies]

On 9/13/12 bilsch wrote:
> Based on what Jukka said I got it to work without using the for loop.
> OK. Now I see what Jukka meant by initializing to NULL.  But I don't
> know what exception to throw for 'misssing return statement'.  Also I
> don't know how to put it in.

What Jukka probably meant to say is that you could throw an exception in 
case your method could not extract a surname from the passed string. 
Like so:


public static String lastName(String wholeName){

      for (int i = 0; i < wholeName.length(); i++){
          if (wholeName.charAt(i)== ' '){
             return wholeName.substring(i + 1);
          }
      }
      // If we reach this line, the parameter
      // wholeName cannot have contained a
      // blank, so we cannot extract the last
      // name.
      throw new exception ("cannot find lastname");
}

Alternatively, your method can simply return null:

public static String lastName(String wholeName){

      for (int i = 0; i < wholeName.length(); i++){
          if (wholeName.charAt(i)== ' '){
             return wholeName.substring(i + 1);
          }
      }
      // If we reach this line, the parameter
      // wholeName cannot have contained a
      // blank, so we cannot extract the last
      // name.
      return null;
}


Which of these variants suits you better depends on how you want to use 
lastName. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Regards,
Stuart