my mind must be in a blank, i cant make sense of this

You have kinda taken half of this and half of that and jammed them together. You don't have to call the toString method, just try and print the Object and somewhere down the chain of method calls it will call the toString method of your Object.

class MyObject {

public String toString() {

return "Hello";

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

MyObject o = new MyObject();

System.out.println(o);

}

}

floundera at 2007-7-12 15:40:13 >

The first toString() looks like thispublic String toString()

{

// etc

return System.out.print(/*whatever*/);

}

This won't compile because PrintStream's print() method is void, so there is nothing to return. If a method is declared to return a String, then it must return a String.

The second is more promising:public String toString()

{

String display;

display = ...

return display;

}

// elsewhere...

c[poss].toString();

The problem here is that you call toString(), it returns a String and you do nothing with the returned string. You say the method displays the string when called, but there is nothing like this in the second method.

Usually the toString() method just returns a String. This makes sense as the caller may want to display it, or may want to do something else like save it to a log file. The second form looks better but it should be used likeSystem.out.println(c[poss].toString());

Or, as flounder suggests, just System.out.println(c[poss]);

pbrockway2a at 2007-7-12 15:40:13 >

System.out.println(c[poss].toString());

Once again, you don't need the call to toString. If you do you are making an unecessary method call. As I said before a call to println makes a call to another method etc etc and the last call is to your toString method. Adding toString in the print statement the method returns a String so now it goes down the method call chain and ends up calling the toString method of String class which in returns itself. Making it unnecessary.

floundera at 2007-7-12 15:40:13 >