how to compare character to comma

[Michael Waserman]

I am trying to compare first character in line to comma and getting "char cannot be dereferenced" error. Here is my code:

line.charAt(0).toString().equals(",");


What am i doing wrong?
Thanks. michael.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

To "dereference" means (in so many words) to do anything that involves putting a dot right after the thing -- i.e., calling a method with thing.something(), or trying to read a member variable, with thing.something else. You're trying to call a method toString() on a char (the return value of charAt() ) and you can't do that. You can't dereference any of the primitive types: byte, short, char, int, long, float, double, or boolean.

To compare characters (or any other primitives), you can use the == operator rather than the equals() method.

line.charAt(0) == ','

Note the single quotes: that's a character constant, not a String.