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POVariable Assignment and loops
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copied!<p>A while back, I was working on a program that hashed values into a hashtable (I don't remember the specifics, and the specifics themselves are irrelevant to the question at hand). Anyway, I had the following code as part of a "recordInput" method:</p> <pre><code>tempElement = new hashElement(someInt); while(in.hasNext() == true) { int firstVal = in.nextInt(); if (firstVal == -911) { break; } tempElement.setKeyValue(firstVal, 0); for(int i = 1; i<numKeyValues;i++) { tempElement.setKeyValue(in.nextInt(), i); } elementArray[placeValue] = tempElement; placeValue++; } // close while loop } // close method </code></pre> <p>This part of the code was giving me a very nasty bug -- no matter how I finagled it, no matter what input I gave the program, it would always produce an array full of only a single value -- the last one. </p> <p>The problem, as I later determined it, was that because I had not created the tempElement variable within the loop, and because values were not being assigned to <code>elementArray[]</code> until after the loop had ended -- every term was defined rather as "tempElement" -- when the loop terminated, every slot in the array was filled with the last value tempElement had taken.</p> <p>I was able to fix this bug by moving the declaration of tempElement within the while loop. My question to you, Stackoverflow, is whether there is another (read: better) way to avoid this bug while keeping the variable declaration of tempElement outside the while loop.</p>

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