why not quotation mark around period

Question

I am beginner in Java. As I was going through the book, I got stuck on this problem. My question is why there are single quotes instead of double quotes around this period. When we want to print a string, we use double quotes.

enter image description here

single quotes represent a Character and double quotes represent a string. — Karan Sharma, Jun 08 '17 at 06:14

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 07 '17 at 19:43

1

'.' would indicate a type of char

"." would indicate a type of string

Both will work to print

answered Jun 07 '17 at 19:43

Easton Bornemeier

1,882
6
22

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 07 '17 at 19:59

In Java, we use '' to delimit a char and "" to delimit a String.

In this particular case, you need a char because you are comparing '.' with the result of a call to the charAt method - which is always a char. That is to say, sentence.charAt(lastCharPosition) has to be a char, so it can only be '.' and never ".".

If you wanted a String, (which you don't in this case), you could write ".".

why not quotation mark around period

2 Answers2