[Baronwyn]

PC Win 7 64-bit system working in jGRASP. I'm relatively new to programming and a rank beginner with Java. Need to ask the user for a birthdate in this specific format (mm dd yyyy) and then extract the month, day, and year separately.

My program up to this point has compiled with no problem. With the code below, it throws the "cannot find symbol" error. This part of the program is not a method within a method, it's just in main.

//Get the date of birth.
System.out.println("Please enter the renter's date of birth (mm dd yyyy): ");
birthMonth = kb.nextChar().trim().charAt(0,1);

The "kb" is the keyboard input. I'm sure the error is in charAt(0,1); but I don't know how else to extract more than one character from a line. I've roamed around the API and haven't found a solution there yet. Thanks.

[Ent]

I'm not a Java programmer myself, so I can only give generic suggestions and anything I can glean from the documentation.

Regarding your specific problem
charAt only takes one parameter, the index, and only gives a single character.
If you wanted to extract multiple characters from a string, either run it a few times in a loop, or better use something like substring.

I'm not sure that's the core of your problem however. You're basically using one line to do two different things: get the input from the keyboard (put it all into a string variable temporarily) and then process it (working on that variable). I'd suggest making sure that each line only does one thing, just so that you can tell whether it's the charAt making itself annoying or whether there's something wrong with the keyboard input. It just makes it easier to debug things when they're split up.

Also, make sure that birthMonth is of the right type. I doubt there's a programmer on earth who hasn't tried to put the character "1" into an integer value expecting it to be 1, and spent their due period of anguish trying to work out what is wrong.

[Baronwyn]

Thanks, that gives me some more ideas to work on. Appreciate it.