vladimirfomene

I will like hear your ideas on how to write succinct code. Today I was trying to solve the following problem on http://codingbat.com. I solve it and my solution worked but I know it was not clean. Here is the problem;

Given a string, if the first or last chars are 'x', return the string without those 'x' chars, and otherwise return the string unchanged.

withoutX("xHix") → "Hi" withoutX("xHi") → "Hi" withoutX("Hxix") → "Hxi"

Here is my solution(quick code):

public String withoutX(String str) { //handles single x characters if(str.length() == 1 && str.charAt(0) == 'x'){ str = ""; //handles empty strings }else if(str.length() == 0){ str = ""; //handles all other cases }else{ if(str.charAt(0) == 'x'){ str = str.substring(1); }

    if(str.charAt(str.length() - 1) == 'x'){
      str = str.substring(0, str.length() - 1);
    } 
  }
  
  
  return str;

}

Here is the solution from coding bat: public String withoutX(String str) { if (str.length() > 0 && str.charAt(0) == 'x') { str = str.substring(1); }

  if (str.length() > 0 && str.charAt(str.length()-1) == 'x') {
    str = str.substring(0, str.length()-1);
  }
  
  return str;
  
  // Solution  notes: check for the 'x' in both spots. If found, use substring()
  // to grab the part without the 'x'. Check that the length is greater than 0
  // each time -- the need for the second length check is tricky to see.
  // One could .substring() instead of .charAt() to look into the string.
}