Java - OR / AND characters (|| &&) illegal in if-statement

Question

I am coding a simple program using a scanner and now want to make sure the user only types "yes" or "no" by comparing the input to these words. I'm using a normal if-statement with || (pipes):

if (!input.equals("yes") || !input.equals("no")) {
    //do something
}

Java (I am using BlueJ) complains about my pipes, it says: "illegal character: '\u00a0'"

What I tried

• I copied & pasted pipes from the wikipedia site to make sure I am really using correct pipe-characters
• restarted BlueJ
• tried using equal signs (&&), same error
• if I removed the second condition and the pipes it works

Does anyone have an idea why it complains and how I can fix it? – Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The character u00a0 is a non-breaking space.

It seems like you typed a control char in your code, replace everything from a copy of this line

if(!input.equals("yes") && !input.equals("no"))

Or simply suppress the spaces in your line and re-type them (making sure you don't type in nbsp).

Notice that I changed the || to && as typing "no" for example would still enter the condition as "yes" would not equals to input. Your condition would then be true || false which would result in true.

In any case, this is not related to the || or && operator, it is the spaces.