Get the text of a JButton using a Action Listener

Question

Is there a reason why getText causes an error: cannot find symbol inside the action listener shown in the code? Also if there is, how would I fix this

Answer 1

There is a nice and simple trick you can use...

@Override
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
{
    String butSrcTxt = e.getActionCommand();
}

If you do not specify the actionCommand for a button, then the text of the button is used instead.

Now, if you do specify the actionCommand property for the button AND you still want to know the text (which seems weird to me) you could use something more like...

@Override
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
{
    Object source = e.getSource();
    if (source instanceof JButton) {
        JButton btn = (JButton)source;
        String butSrcTxt = btn.getText();
    }

}