Need a way to associate strings with individual array elements

Question

I am a complete beginner in programming and I'm working on a program for my mother that tracks her employee's monetary intake through a "horse race", with each employee having a horse and the program tracking their input to a UI made to look like a racetrack. After the help from my last inquiry, I've greatly simplified my mess of code but I am now faced with a new problem in that, after sorting the values largest to smallest, I have no way of associating the sorted values with the correct horse. I understand this explanation is confusing so I hope my code will do most of the talking for me here.

I honestly have no idea where to start with this. As I said in my last inquiry, I'm a complete beginner and severely lack the terminology or knowledge to find an answer here.

public class HorseRace {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
        String horse1 = "#5 Gitty-Up";
        String horse2 = "#7 Lady Simmons";
        String horse3 = "#6 Burning Peanutbutter";
        String horse4 = "#10 White Lightning";
        String horse5 = "#3 Bella";
        String horse6 = "#1 Meg The Stallion";
        float h1val;
        float h2val;
        float h3val;
        float h4val;
        float h5val;
        float h6val;
        System.out.println("Input amount for " + horse1 + ":");
        h1val = sc.nextFloat();
        System.out.println("Input amount for " + horse2 + ":");
        h2val = sc.nextFloat();
        System.out.println("Input amount for " + horse3 + ":");
        h3val = sc.nextFloat();
        System.out.println("Input amount for " + horse4 + ":");
        h4val = sc.nextFloat();
        System.out.println("Input amount for " + horse5 + ":");
        h5val = sc.nextFloat();
        System.out.println("Input amount for " + horse6 + ":");
        h6val = sc.nextFloat();
        Float[] values = new Float[]{h1val, h2val, h3val, h4val, h5val, h6val};
        Arrays.sort(values, Collections.reverseOrder());
        //currently displays horses with the wrong number. Need a way to tie the horse name strings to their respective float elements
        System.out.println("The current race progress is :");
             System.out.println(horse1 + " with $" + values[0]);
             System.out.println(horse2 + " with $" + values[1]);
             System.out.println(horse3 + " with $" + values[2]);
             System.out.println(horse4 + " with $" + values[3]);
             System.out.println(horse5 + " with $" + values[4]);
             System.out.println(horse6 + " with $" + values[5]);
    }
}

my desired result is printing the correct horse with the correct value. For example, if I put that #5 brought in $11 and #7 brought in $14, the program would print that #7 is in the lead with $14 and #5 is in second place with $11.

Currently, the program always prints #5 as being in the lead with the highest value, #7 being in second with the second highest, etc.

I understand this is because I am hard calling the horse1-horse6 values meaning they don't change, but these are acting more as placeholders while I figure out how to associate the right horse with the right value

Answer 1

This is where you should create a Horse class and store the data as instances of Horse.

class Horse {
    private String name;
    private float value;

    public String getName() { return name; }
    public float getValue() { return value; }

    public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; }
    public void setValue(float value) { this.value = value; }
}

And then in your main method:

Horse[] horses = new Horse[6] {
    new Horse(), new Horse(), new Horse(), new Horse(), new Horse(), new Horse()
};
horses[0].setName("#5 Gitty-Up");
horses[1].setName("#7 Lady Simmons");
horses[2].setName("#6 Burning Peanutbutter");
// and so on...

// you should use a for loop here instead of writing similar lines over and over again!
for (int i = 0 ; i < 6 ; i++) {
    System.out.println("Input amount for " + horses[i].getName() + ":");
    horses[i].setValue(sc.nextFloat());
}

Arrays.sort(horses, Comparator.comparingDouble(Horse::getValue).reversed());
System.out.println("The current race progress is :");
for (int i = 0 ; i < 6 ; i++) {
    System.out.println(horses[i].getName() + " with $" + horses[i].getValue());
}

By using a class, you are essentially grouping data that belongs together, together. On the line Arrays.sort(horses, Comparator.comparingDouble(Horse::getValue).reversed());, I am sorting the whole array of horses together, by their values.

If the concepts of classes and objects are new to you, that just means it's time to learn about some new concepts. Classes and objects are very important.