Arraylists

[talia]

Hi I need some help with arraylists, I am trying to load a text file into an array list with the following method:

public static ArrayList LoadFile(JTextArea src){
        String line = "";
        ArrayList data = new ArrayList();
        try{
            FileReader fr = new FileReader("Products.txt");
            BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr);
            while ((line = br.readLine()) != null){
                
             src.append(line);
                src.append(System.getProperty("line.separator"));
           } 
        }catch(FileNotFoundException fN) {
                fN.printStackTrace();
            }
        catch(IOException e){
            System.out.println(e);
        }
        return data;

I use netbeans, and have to make things work with a GUI. I can display the contents of this file in a JTextArea by pressing a Display button. What I would like to know is how to proceed from here. I want to be able to search the arraylist for a particular word when typed in the GUI and then display it. How is this possible. I have spent hours to figure this out so far and couldnt come up with a solution.
Also the above arraylist is defined in a class, while the search and display is done in the MainFrame class.

Hope some one can show me to the right direction.

thanks

[christopherx]

Well splitting it up into lines and placing it into the textarea is all well and good for displaying it. For searching through it I would highly reccomend concatenating it all into a string, and using the String API to help you find the method for looking for certain patterns. For looking for certain patterns in strings, I would HIGHLY recommend teaching yourself regular expressions :)

[JosAH]

A List has an indexOf( ... ) method; it searches the list and if an element is found, its index is returned (otherwise -1 is returned). Read the API documentation for the List interface.

kind regards,

Jos

[christopherx]

A List has an indexOf( ... ) method; it searches the list and if an element is found, its index is returned (otherwise -1 is returned). Read the API documentation for the List interface.

kind regards,

Jos

I think using the indexOf() method assumes that the pattern will match the whole line, which isn't always the case.

[JosAH]

I think using the indexOf() method assumes that the pattern will match the whole line, which isn't always the case.

True, but then maybe a list of lines of text isn't the ideal data structure to solve the problem ...

kind regards,

Jos

[talia]

Thanks, for your replies I will now have a look at all the recommended documentation and hopefully can solve this:)
cheers....