Thread: I am a Java newbie!! Please Help me!!

Hi~ I am new here
I was just following a tutorial from a book
and I found something that I can't understand

Here's my source code:

public class Airplane2 {
private String nameOfAirp = "C10111";
private int fuel = 10000;
private int goPerL = 10; //Km/Liter

public Airplane2(String nameOfAirp, int fuel, int goPerL){
this.nameOfAirp = nameOfAirp;
setFuel(fuel);
this.goPerL = goPerL;
}

public Airplane2(String nameOfAirp, int fuel){
this(nameOfAirp, fuel, 10);
}

public Airplane2(String nameOfAirp){
this(nameOfAirp, 10000, 10);
}

public Airplane2(){
this("C10111", 10000, 10);
}

public void setFuel(int fuel){
if(fuel < 1000){
System.out.println("Lack of fuel!!");
this.fuel = 0;
return;
}
this.fuel = fuel;
}

public int getFuel(){return fuel;}
public int getGoPerL(){return goPerL;}
public String getNameOfAirp(){return nameOfAirp;}

public String toString(){
String s = "";
if(fuel > 999){
s = "Name of the plane: " + nameOfAirp;
s += " Flight distance: " + goPerL*fuel;
}
else{
s = "This plane cannot depart!!";
}
return s;
}
}

public class Airplane2Main {
public static void main(String[] args){
Airplane2 air948 = new Airplane2("Eagle Five", 6000, 11);
System.out.println(air948.toString());
Airplane2 air947 = new Airplane2("Center Five");
System.out.println(air947);
Airplane2 air949 = new Airplane2();
System.out.println(air949);
}
}

I am curious about the texts.
I thought there should be air947.toString and air949.toString like air948.toString
but there was no compile error.
Why is that???

In your Airplane2 class you have a toString() method so when you try to print the object of that class then it automatically going to call the to string method for that object. So if you have toString() in your cass it doesn't matter that whether you print air948.toString() or just 948.

Originally Posted by aprabhat

In your Airplane2 class you have a toString() method so when you try to print the object of that class then it automatically going to call the to string method for that object. So if you have toString() in your cass it doesn't matter that whether you print air948.toString() or just 948.

But why not other methods like getFuel(), getPerL(), getNameOfAirp()??
Is there any rule for automatically activating only toString() method??

you can say that it's a kind of rule.
Implementing toString() method in java is done by overriding the Object’s toString() method. The java toString() method is used when we need a string representation of an object. It is defined in Object class. This method can be overridden to customize the String representation of the Object. In your overridden method you build a string that contain the plane details.
So if you remove the toString() method from your class then air948.toString() will going to call the toString() of Object class that is the super class for all the classes and print the string representation of your object.
In java most of the classes like Integer, Float etc has override the toString() of Object. For more details on toString() read class hierarchy and their method implementation from "JavaDocs".