I\'m a beginner in coding. I was recently working with to create a chatting programme where a user will chat with my computer. Here is a part of the code:
Sy
You're looking for the "OR" operator - which is normally represented by a double pipe: ||
if (b.equals("good") || b.equals("it was good")) {
System.out.println("Thank goodness");
} else if (b.equals("bad") || b.equals("it was bad")) {
System.out.println("Why was it bad?");
String c = scanner3.nextLine();
System.out.println("Don't worry, everything will be ok, ok?");
String d= scanner10.nextLine();
}
You can have two conditions if you use the double bars(||
). They mean "Or". That means only ONE of your conditions has to be true for the loop to execute.
Something like this:
if(condition || otherCondition || anotherCondition) {
//code here
If you want all of conditions to be true use &&
. This means that ALL conditions must be true in order for the loop to execute. if any one of them is false the loop will not execute.
Something like this:
if(condition && otherCondition && anotherCondition) {
//code here
You can also group conditions, if you want certain pairs of them to be true. something like:
if(condition || (otherCondition && anotherCondition)) {
//code here
You can use logical operators
to combine your boolean expressions
.
&&
is a logical and (both conditions need to be true
)||
is a logical or (at least one condition needs to be true
)^
is a xor (exactly one condition needs to be true
)==
compares objects by identity)For example:
if (firstCondition && (secondCondition || thirdCondition)) {
...
}
There are also bitwise operators:
&
is a bitwise and|
is a bitwise or^
is a xorThey are mainly used when operating with bits and bytes
. However there is another difference, let's take again a look at this expression:
firstCondition && (secondCondition || thirdCondition)
If you use the logical operators and firstCondition
evaluates to false
then Java
will not compute the second or third condition as the result of the whole logical expression is already known to be false
. However if you use the bitwise operators then Java
will not stop and continue computing everything:
firstCondition & (secondCondition | thirdCondition)
This is probably more answer than you need at this point. But, as several others already point out, you need the OR operator "||". There are a couple of points that nobody else has mentioned:
1) If (b.equals("good") || b.equals("it was good")) <-- If "b" is null here, you'll get a null pointer exception (NPE). If you are genuinely looking at hard-coded values, like you are here, then you can reverse the comparison. E.g.
if ("good".equals(b) || "it was good".equals(b))
The advantage of doing it this way is that the logic is precisely the same, but you'll never get an NPE, and the logic will work just how you expect.
2) Java uses "short-circuit" testing. Which in lay-terms means that Java stops testing conditions once it's sure of the result, even if all the conditions have not yet been tested. E.g.:
if((b != null) && (b.equals("good") || b.equals("it was good")))
You will not get an NPE in the code above because of short-circuit nature. If "b" is null, Java can be assured that no matter what the results of the next conditions, the answer will always be false. So it doesn't bother performing those tests.
Again, that's probably more information than you're prepared to deal with at this stage, but at some point in the near future the NPE of your test will bite you. :)
There is a simpler way.
if (b.contains("good")) {
...
}
else if (b.contains("bad")) {
...
}
Here are some common symbols used in everyday language and their programming analogues:
&&
, in Java.||
, in Java."XOR" is simply "x || y but both cannot be true at the same time". This translates to x ^ y
in Java.
In your code, you probably meant to use "or" (you just used the incorrect "incorrect solution" :p), so you should use "||" in the second code block for it to become identical to the first code block.
Hope this helped :)