In response to Chris Justus again, here’s how I’d comment his example.

The example he had was:

// Stripping trailing phone extensions for contact numbers for other group X, system XYZ...
String newNum = "";
keepGoing = true;
for(int c=0;c = '0' && ch <='9' && keepGoing) {
    newNum += ch;
  } else if (ch  '(' || ch  ' ' || ch  'x' || ch  'X')) {
    keepGoing = false;
  }
}

And here's how I would do it:

String newNum = stripPhoneExtension(oldNumber); // later in the class... /** * Strip the extension from a phone number. Everything before the extension * will be returned. * @return the (stripped) phone number. */ private String stripPhoneExtension(String phoneNumber) { int phoneNumberLength = phoneNumber.length(); char[] extensionMarkers = {'(', ' ', 'x', 'X'}; for (int index = 0; index < phoneNumberLength; index++) { char phoneDigit = phoneNumber.charAt(); if (isCharInArray(phoneDigit, extensionMarkers)) { return phoneNumber.substring(0, index); } } return phoneNumber; } /** * Check to see if a char is in an array. Similar to the * List.contains() method, but useful where performance may be * an issue. * @param searchTerm the char to look for. * @param charArray the array to look in. * @return true if the char is present in the array, otherwise false. */ private boolean isCharInArray(char searchTerm, char[] charArray) { for (int i = 0; i < charArray.length; i++) { if (searchTerm == charArray[i]) { return true; } } return false; }

Actually, for private methods like these, the param and return tags are probably overkill, but for public or protected methods I would put them there.

Hopefully that clears up some misunderstandings.