Strange behaviour parsing booleans in java

Question

I am developing my very first libGDX game, is some kind of Idle game with desktop simulator. But my question is about Java in general.

In that game I would like to manage GameEvents data from a CSV file at first run, and later it would be saved to Gdx.App.Preferences as a String, that works well.

But what doesn't work as expected is what it seems to be the easiest thing, the CSV parse method, is nothing too complicated, I'm only doing a loop for each CSV field and storing it in a GameEvent. Class (all primitive data types, int, string and float) and actually it works... but it says some Booleans are false when actually they wasn't.

This is my parse method:

 private void parseEventData(String data) {

    String[] text = data.split(";");
    int i=0;
    for(String field : text) {
        switch(i){
            case 0:
                this.id=field;
                break;
            case 1:
                this.eventState=field;
                break;
            case 2:
              [...]
            case 8:
                this.mainEvent= (Boolean.getBoolean(field));
                break;
            case 9:
                this.active= (Boolean.getBoolean(field));
                break;
            case 10:
                this.continueEvent= (Boolean.getBoolean(field));
                break;
             [...]
            }
        i++;
    }
}

To debug it i've included a pair of println(), the first one prints "data" raw as it enters with 2 GameEvents values:

1970MM01;PENDING;titlelonglonglong//subtitle//Mom//this is the maintext//is better if you could separate it in//various lines;MAIL//MAILB;1970MM02;NULL;MAIL;MAIL;true;true;true;1970;1;0.5;0.5;1;1;0;true;60 1970MM02;PENDING; childtitlewith a very very very very long title//subtitle//blah blah//booooh;MANAGER//MANAGERb//MANAGERc;NULL;NULL;MAIL;MAIL;false;true;false;1970;0;0.5;0.5;1;1;0;true;30

And this other is after parsing it in GameEvent.class, just parsed without passing to any other method...

1970MM01;PENDING;titlelonglonglong//subtitle//Mom//this is the maintext//is better if you could separate it in//various lines;MAIL//MAILB;1970MM02;NULL;MAIL;MAIL;false;false;false;1970;1.0;0.5;0.5;1.0;1.0;0.0;true;60

I've checked the documentation about Boolean.valueOf() and Boolean.getBoolean... but both give some random-looking values in some fields but works well in others...

What am I doing wrong?

P.S: I know I can do some workaround with "if" statements, and changing true/false by 0/1, or using Json, but I need to know what I've misunderstood in something so easy as a csv parser T.T

Answer 1

You’re using the wrong method.

Use parseBoolean(field), not getBoolean(field).

---

As per the documentation for getBoolean()

Returns true if and only if the system property named by the argument exists and is equal to, ignoring case, the string "true". A system property is accessible through getProperty, a method defined by the System class.

so unless there’s a system property named "true", whose value is "True", this will return false.

However, the documentation for parseBoolean() says:

Parses the string argument as a boolean. The boolean returned represents the value true if the string argument is not null and is equal, ignoring case, to the string "true". Otherwise, a false value is returned, including for a null argument.

which is what you want.