Missing return statement when trying to return a boolean value

Question

I keep getting an error in java and I don't know why "missing return statement". What I'm trying to do is create a method with two parameters (String and char) check if the char appears in the string and return a boolean value based on the comparison. Here's what I have so far:

  public static boolean compare(String h, char x){

int counter = 0;
for(int i = 0; i < h.length(); i++){
  counter++;
  if(h.charAt(i) == 'o'){
    return true;
  }
  else
    return false;
}

  }

Again, the error in the console is "missing return statement". Please be aware that I'm not an expert in Java and probably I have more errors in my code, my apologize in advance for that.

edit: Don't look at the indentation, I just copy and paste the code here. edit 2: "h" is "Hello world" in my code.

Answer 1

You should assign the boolean result to a variable instead of returning it in the loop. Add the return statement after the for loop, this should fix your issue. HTH

 public static boolean compare(String h, char x){

       int counter = 0;
       boolean flag = false;

       for(int i = 0; i < h.length(); i++){
         counter++;
         if(h.charAt(i) == 'o'){
             flag = true;
         }
         else
             flag = false;
       }
        return flag;
}