Final answer:
You need to use the 'indexOf' method within the 'stringSearch' function to find a substring within a larger string and return an appropriate message based on whether the substring is found.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question involves completing a static method stringSearch within the context of programming - likely a Computer Science or Programming class project. The method should search for the first occurrence of a substring (chr) within a larger string (phrase) and return a statement indicating the index at which the substring was found or that it was not found at all. If found, the result should be "The characters were found at ____ index." If not found, the result should be "Those characters could not be found."
To solve this, we would implement the Java method like so:
public static String stringSearch(String phrase, String chr) {
int index = phrase.indexOf(chr);
if (index != -1) {
return "The characters were found at " + index + " index.";
}
return "Those characters could not be found.";
}
This code uses the indexOf method which is a standard method in the Java programming language for finding the index of a substring within a larger string. The indexOf method returns the index of the first occurrence of the substring or -1 if the substring does not exist within the string.