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expected ), illegal start of expression

Answer 1

+2 A:

new should be all lower-case
ioe should be ex
Remove the bottom-most curly-bracket
Add one more closing curly bracket after JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, ioe.getMessage()); displaycontact();
Use the prescribed coding conventions, especially the indentation ones

Bozho 2009-11-27 13:53:41

Answer 2

+1 A:

You appear to have a spurious open curly brace in front of public void actionPerformed.

But really, you need to be able to sort these out yourself. You can't post your code to SO every time it doesn't compile... Something that may help here is an editor that can do folding (just about every IDE would do this), or even the functionality that vi has when you press % on a brace/bracket/quote etc. (which jumps to the closing symbol letting you match up start and end).

Plus, whenever you ask a question, always provide the diagnostic information - which in this case would be the compiler output. It's basically rude to expect people to help you while withholding pertinent information.

Andrzej Doyle 2009-11-27 13:56:13

i've been here for 3 hours! its not like it just happened

addiosamigo 2009-11-27 13:57:11

Andrzej Doyle 2009-11-27 14:01:36

@dtsazza: I second your point about sorting out these errors yourself. However I wanted to point out that the curly brace in front of `public void actionPerformed` is needed because that is a function declaration. addiosamigo was actually missing the closing brace for that opening one.

Mr. Shiny and New 2009-11-27 14:09:17

Good point, Mr. Shiny. That's yet another reason for proper indentation, since that brace looked very much like a typo where it was/is.

Andrzej Doyle 2009-11-27 15:54:19

Answer 3

+1 A:

You're short one closing curly brace after the last displaycontact();

You then need to remove the final curly brace.

dpwood 2009-11-27 13:59:44

Answer 4

+1 A:

addiosamigo, I would really recommend that you be able to deal with these kinds of errors youself, since it will help you much more in the future.

To help in that, here are the steps that I would take to solve this kind of thing:

Delete all the code from the file, except the minimum necessary to compile. See if this compiles (if not, you have a serious problem that's not part of the code. Perhaps a problem with a project definition or something).
Start adding code back in very small chunks.
Each time you add code back, make sure it compiles.
Eventually, you'll add something that doesn't compile, and you'll know the bad code is there.

Please note that doing this is not always so simple, since sometimes you need to add code in a certain order for it to compile.

For example, adding the code for function Foo, which calls function Bar, without adding the code for Bar will obviously cause a compile error. In this kind of case, you'll have to do smart tricks (like adding Bar back in, without any actual implementation, etc).

All in all, the strategy is the same as for every bug: find the smallest case that reproduces it, and work from there.

Hope this helps

Edan Maor 2009-11-27 14:06:07

thanks for that, i'll do that if i get problems again

addiosamigo 2009-11-27 15:19:36

Glad I could help.

Edan Maor 2009-11-27 17:12:15

Answer 5

+6 A:

You are missing a curly brace here:

            displaycontact();
        }}});  // <- HERE

This is nearly impossible to see with your code because it is formatted very poorly. You should use a text editor which highlights matching braces. This lets you see quickly what that closing brace closes.

I advise you to reformat the code so that there is proper indentation. You have quite a lot of indentation so you may want to consider using two spaces or a tab size with the tab width set to two. Proper indentation lets you scan the code veritcally to see where the braces are closing things.

I reformatted your code in Eclipse and the ActionListener which is causing your problem now looks like this:

imp.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {

  public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent event) {
    JFileChooser fileopen = new JFileChooser();

    int ret = fileopen.showDialog(null, "Open file");

    if (ret == JFileChooser.APPROVE_OPTION) {
      try {
        BufferedReader fileStream = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("src/contacts.buab"));
        while (true) {
          String fileInput = fileStream.readLine();
          if (fileInput == null)
            break;

          Contact a = new Contact();
          a.setname(fileInput);
          a.setsurname(fileStream.readline());
          a.setphone(fileStream.readLine());
          a.setmobile(fileStream.readLine());
          a.setaddress(fileStream.readLine());
          a.setpostcode(fileStream.readline());
          Contacts.add(a);
          System.out.println(a.getname());

        }

        fileStream.close();
      } catch (Exception ex) {
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, ioe.getMessage());
      }
      displaycontact();
    }
  }
});

Notice that the last curly brace blob is now in three lines and that each line is less indented than the previous? This would make it immediately obvious where you were missing a curly brace.

Mr. Shiny and New 2009-11-27 14:07:17

thank you! thank you thank you!

addiosamigo 2009-11-27 14:20:53

Good job, going through that code was a mess.

C. Ross 2009-11-27 14:46:42

SO the best IDE!!!

Carlos Heuberger 2009-11-27 15:15:00

The beauty of using Eclipse (or any decent IDE) is that I didn't have to read the code to find the compilation error. Paste it in, go to the line where the compiler indicates the error, and you can see right away that the brackets aren't lining up because of the matching bracket highlight. Add one brace where indicated, remove the last brace (I guess it was the misplaced one?) and CTRL-SHIFT-F, and you're done. IDEs add so much productivity.

Mr. Shiny and New 2009-11-30 13:58:18

Answer 6

A:

The if statement

if (ret == JFileChooser.APPROVE_OPTION)

is missing it's closing brace, you must add it just after

displaycontact();

at the end of the source is an extra brace.

A few hints to help yourself in the future:

make sure your code indenting is correct, fixing your whitespacing and indenting would have lead you to the culprit
anonymous classes can make code unreadable if they consist of more than a few lines, your action listener is a fine example of this. code becomes much more readable if you create a separate nested class for it instead of inserting large anonymous classes.

Edit: to get started have a look at Sun's Java code conventions like and its indenting chapter. IDE's like eclipse supoort formatting and indenting of your code too.

rsp 2009-11-27 14:08:45

is there any good sites that help you with indentation? i've never really learnt it.

addiosamigo 2009-11-27 14:21:42

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