Arrays and if statements

[gundershot]

hey everyone, im very new to java, and i thought it might be interesting to try to make an AI which you can talk casually to, ive made it so that when it asks you a yes or no question you can say things like yeah, sure, okay, nope, nah and so on, but the way ive done this is by making an if statement which looks somewhat like this:

if(timestable.equals("y")||timestable.equals("Y")| |timestable.equals("yes")||timestable.equals("Yes" )||timestable.equals("Yep")||timestable.equals("ye p")||timestable.equals("yeah")||timestable.equals( "Yeah")||timestable.equals("okay")||timestable.equ als("Okay")||timestable.equals("Sure")||timestable .equals("sure"))

i was wondering if it was maybe possible to put all of these strings into an array, and make it so that you can say any one of those, without needing to say all of them, and that will make it possible to make the if statement look something like this:

if(timestable.equals(array))

[JosAH]

Use a Set that contains all synonyms for "yes", in, say, uppercase; you can do this:

if (yesSet.contains(answer.toUpperCase()))
   ...

kind regards,

Jos

[Tolls]

I would map them to a single affirmative result, so all those would be "translated" into a single thing the rest of the code can understand (say "Y" for all the above).
This Translator can then hold all the unpleasantness, which you can add to or change later on to use a database maybe, or file or whatever.

So you get the user response and call translate() which gives you a far more limited set of results.
If it can't find a translation then it can simply return the original text.

Note, this is just off the top of my head. I usually hide these things away so the main code flow looks neater and I can always rework the messy stuff later as I get better ideas of what to do.

[Tolls]

I write too much...

[gundershot]

hey JosAH, thanks for the response, sets sound useful for what i'm doing, but im not sure how to use them D:

[JosAH]

hey JosAH, thanks for the response, sets sound useful for what i'm doing, but im not sure how to use them D:

There are tutorials and there's always the API documentation ...

kind regards,

Jos

ps. @Tolls: tl;dr ;-)