Better way to find index of item in ArrayList?

Question

For an Android app, I have the following functionality

private ArrayList _categories; // eg [\"horses\",\"camels\"[,etc]]

private int getCateg         


        

Answer 1

There is indeed a fancy shmancy native function in java you should leverage.

ArrayList has an instance method called

indexOf(Object o)

(http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/ArrayList.html)

You would be able to call it on _categories as follows:

_categories.indexOf("camels")

I have no experience with programming for Android - but this would work for a standard Java application.

Good luck.