Meaning of a single plus sign in an array

Question

Following this tutorial I saw that at the end in the MainActivity.java there is an array that I understand but dont know what a single + sign does at the end

String Slecteditem= itemname[+position];

I remove the + and I think it works the same way, but not sure if there is a purpose that I cant see.

@Reimeus Given the difficulty of entering this particular typo (Shift required), I found Sergey's answer intriguing. — chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-, Dec 30 '15 at 22:24

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 30 '15 at 21:52

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+ is the unary plus operator. It's unnecessary here as array indices can never be negative

answered Dec 30 '15 at 21:52

Reimeus

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 30 '15 at 21:53

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It's a unary positive, so your intuition was correct +position is the same as position.

answered Dec 30 '15 at 21:53

Elliott Frisch

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score 3 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

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I bet the author of that code was just writing too much JavaScript lately. In JavaScript, this is a popular trick because unary + is the most concise way to convert a string to a number. In Java, unary plus can only be used for more obscure conversions, but that doesn't apply here because position is already an int, and I won't recommend ever writing such code anyway.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

Community

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answered Dec 30 '15 at 22:13

Sergey Salnikov

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 30 '15 at 22:10

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single positive(+) and single negative(-) signs in java are unary operators meaning they are used for indices, that is to depict that a number is either positive or negative. your code will still work since array values are never negative

answered Dec 30 '15 at 22:10

Agbalaya Rasaq

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Meaning of a single plus sign in an array

4 Answers4