Java Programming - Unclosed Literal

Question

For the following code I'm getting an error message saying :

test.java:78: error: unclosed character literal

Person p = new Person(1, "G", 12,'female');

^

What could be the reason, since I don't have an unclosed literal there?

code :

class Person{

private int id;

private String name;

private int age;

private char gender;

//constructor for Person class

public Person(int id, String name, int age, char gender){

this.id = id;

this.name = name;

this.age = age;

this.gender = gender;

}

//getter & setters for attributes of Person class

public void setId(int id){

this.id = id;

}

public int getId(int id){

return id;

}

public void setName(String name){

this.name = name;

}

public String getName(String name){

return name;

}

public void setAge(String name){

this.age = age;

}

public int getAge(int age){

return age;

}

public void setGender(String name){

this.gender = gender;

}

public char getGender(char gender){

return gender;

}

public void display(){

System.out.println(id);

System.out.println(name);

System.out.println(age);

System.out.println(gender);

}

}

class test{

public static void main(String[] args){

Person p = new Person(1, "G", 12, 'female');

p.display();

}

}

Answer 1

In Java, single quotes (') are used for character literals. In your above code snippet, you define Person as taking a gender argument, which you specify as type char (presumably being something like 'M', 'F', 'T'). However, you pass in 'female', which is not a single character, and thus cannot be enclosed by single quotes.

For future reference, the up carat doesn't always point to the exact point in that line where the error was thrown (which I imagine is what lead to your confusion).