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

Java API specifies two methods you could use: indexOf(Object obj) and lastIndexOf(Object obj). The first one returns the index of the element if found, -1 otherwise. The second one returns the last index, that would be like searching the list backwards.