Better way to find index of item in ArrayList?

Question

For an Android app, I have the following functionality

private ArrayList<String> _categories; // eg ["horses","camels"[,etc]]  private int getCategoryPos(String category) {     for(int i = 0; i < this._categories.size(); ++i) {         if(this._categories.get(i) == category) return i;     }      return -1; } 

Is that the "best" way to write a function for getting an element's position? Or is there a fancy shmancy native function in java the I should leverage?

Answer 1

ArrayList has a indexOf() method. Check the API for more, but here's how it works:

private ArrayList<String> _categories; // Initialize all this stuff  private int getCategoryPos(String category) {   return _categories.indexOf(category); } 

indexOf() will return exactly what your method returns, fast.