Efficient String Character Verification

In Java, a common task is to determine if a specific character appears within a string. While a traditional approach involves iterating through the string, an efficient alternative utilizing indexOf() eliminates the need for looping.

IndexOf() scans the string character by character and returns the index of the first instance where the specified character appears. If the character is absent, a value of -1 is returned.

Consider the example of checking if the character 'a' is present in a string called 'text'. Using indexOf(), we can simply call:

int index = text.indexOf('a');

If 'text' contains 'a', the returned index will be its position in the string. Conversely, if 'a' is not present, the index will be -1. This approach effectively performs the condition check without the overhead of a loop.