Removing a character from an ArrayList of characters

Question

I am facing with this unwanted char to int conversion in a loop. Say I have this List of Characters and I want to remove one of those:

List<Character> chars = new ArrayList<>();
chars.add('a');
chars.add('b');
chars.add('c');
chars.remove('a');  // or chars.remove('a'-'0');

so 'a' is interpreted as its int value and I'm getting an IndexOutOfBoundsException exception. Is there any easy workaround for this?

Answer 1

A char is promoted to an int, which takes precedence over autoboxing, so remove(int) is called instead of remove(Object) you may have intuitively expect.

You can force the "right" method to be called by boxing the argument yourself:

chars.remove(Character.valueOf('a'));

Answer 2

You need to cast it to an object type to force the compiler to choose remove(Object) instead of remove(int):

chars.remove((Character) 'a');

Answer 3

You can search through the list for where a happens to be.

chars.remove(chars.indexOf('a'));