Reading from a File, ArrayList and "reference"

[pokadean]

Hi everyone! So this is my piece of program that basically what it does is reading rows from a file.
Every row has several fields separated by "," and can be of different type (rows starting with P, C, ecc..)
One of the types of rows has a field specifying a code of who sends a product and another field about the code of the actual product delivered.
So on my file I will have more rows with the same code of the person who sends products.
What I'm trying to ask you is: how can i store successfully those codes of suppliers (they can be repeated, i mean the same supplier code can appear in more rows so TreeMap is not an option) referenced each time to the actual product code delivered?

On my program I did something like:

ArrayList<String> fprcode = new ArrayList<String>();
ArrayList<String> su= new ArrayList<String>();
//...
//...
//... part where i read from file using SPLIT until I reach the part where i'm checking for the F type rows

if (elements[0].equals("F")){
			        String character=elements[0];
				String supplCode=elements[1];
				String productCode=elements[2];
				
                                fprcode.add(supplCode);
				su.add(productCode);
}

so basically now I have to ArrayList's where I have stored the two types of codes...

BUT when I'm trying to do something like

    public ArrayList<String> getProductCodesSupplier(String supplierCode){
    	return null;
    	}

Meaning that, given my code i want to retrieve ALL the products sent by him, HOW can I actually "reference" in some way the two arraylists?
Is arraylist a bad idea? where should I store my two elements so that they are always together and referenced one another given that I need to have duplicates allowed?

Thanks guys, hope I made myself clear. :)

[jim829]

Well, I am not quite certain I understand the problem. It hints at using a Map of Lists. Where the key is the supplier and the List it maps to are the codes. Or perhaps a Map of Maps would be better.

Regards,
Jim

[pokadean]

Ok, so if I do something like

public void getResult(Map<String, ArrayList<String>> result) {

for (String s: suu){
result.put(s, su);
}

//where
ArrayList<String> suu= new ArrayList<String>();  //list of supplier codes
ArrayList<String> su= new ArrayList<String>(); //list of product codes
}

but now when i'm actually trying to retrieve the list of products of a certain supplier it doesn't give me back the actual list :/
I'm close to the solution but not yet..

[pokadean]

Just a thing: how can I mark the end of row if some of the rows have a variable length?

like, one row has 3 fields and another 4?
I know that i CAN'T do something like:

String character=elements[0];
				String supplCode=elements[1];
				String productCode=elements[2];
				suu.add(productCode);
				if(elements[3] != null){
				String productCode2=elements[3];
				suu.add(productCode2);
				}
				if(elements[4] != null){
				String productCode4=elements[4];
				suu.add(productCode4);
				}

because it doesn't work

[pokadean]

i did it using elements.lenght!

[jim829]

You said the values are separated by commas. So if you do the following:

String line;
String [] vals = line.split(",");

It should allocated just enough space to store the values. So you can use the length field of the arrays.

Regards,
Jim