Ready to give up!

[Stacey Johnson]

Hi,
I've been racking my brains all night with this problem as you can see in my last couple posts. I'm ready to give up. I don't know what else to do. My problem is that I have to get the user to input an array of integers (up to 30) and to break out of the loop before 30 they press 0 to get the result which is the smallest integer entered. I've got everything figured out up until the result. Now that I have my program breaking at 0 it always returns the integer at 0. I understand that I have to store the last index value other than 0 or exclude 0 from returning the smallest integer, but I just can't figure it out. I'm really new to Java - only 5 chapters in my book. So I feel this is over my head as I can't seem to find any examples of it or anything. Can anyone help me, I'm at the end of my rope. My program is as follows:
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;

public class Array5_3 {
public static void main(String [] args) {

int[] integers = new int[30];
for (int x = 0; x < integers.length; x++){

String input = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null,
"Please enter a number, \nto return the smallest number enter 0.",
"TME 2, Programming Exercise 5.3", JOptionPane.QUESTION_MESSAGE);
integers[x] = Integer.parseInt(input);
if(integers[x] == 0){
break;
}

}

int small = integers[0];
for (int x = 0; x < integers.length; x++) {
if (small > integers[x])
small = integers[x];
}

JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "The smallest integer inputed was "+ small,
"TME 2, Programming Exercise 5.3", JOptionPane.PLAIN_MESSAGE);

System.exit(0);

Stacey

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

OK, well, the quick fix is indeed to just store the last index at which you saved a number, then use that as the upper limit of the second loop. First, move the declaration of the first "x" up to before the loop:

public static void main(String [] args) {
   int[] integers = new int[30];
   int x;
   for (x = 0; x < integers.length; x++) {

Then use a different counter and loop limit for the second loop:

   for (int i = 0; i<x; i++) {
      if (small > integers[x])
      small = integers[x];
   } 

Now, this should work, but there may be some problems remaining for you to track down. Does the program work if you input 0 numbers? If you input 30 numbers?
[ January 21, 2004: Message edited by: Ernest Friedman-Hill ]

[Mark Vedder]

Ernest (& Stacey),
It looks like you have a small error in your suggested loop:

for (int i = 0; i<x; i++) {
      if (small > integers[x])
      small = integers[x];   
} 

When you copied and pasted, you forgot to change the index value being checked from x to i. Here the same array item (integers[x]) is being compared in each iteration of the loop; and it is zero.
It needs to be changed to:

for (int i = 0; i<x; i++) {
      if (small > integers[[B]i[/B]])
      small = integers[[B]i[/B]];
} 

Regards,
Mark
[ January 22, 2004: Message edited by: Mark Vender ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Good catch! Thanks.