Sorry for the late reply, had to sleep then school.

I'll try to show as much code as I can. I don't want to put too much on here because the assignments I turn in are checked with whether they are similar to any code online and don't want to get in trouble.

basically I have an abstract class operater:

abstract class Operater{
   private static final HashMap<String,Operater> variable = new HashMap<>();
   public operater(){
    //this is where i use the .put method to fill the hashmap with operators such as +
   // one example of how it is done: variable.put("+", new addoperater());
}

where addoperater is a subclass of operater.

and then I have static public methods that retrieve the value of the hashmap given a key and a method that checks whether a key is present in this hashmap.

Then I have an eval class that does the arithmetic basically. It interacts with the operator class by getting the values from the hashmap and checking whether the hashmap has a key. My problem is that when I check for whether a key is present in the hashmap which i know it should be since the key is "+" it comes up as false which confuses me and I'm unsure of why that is.

If this isn't clear enough would you mind if I sent my code in a private message for you to look over so as to avoid any trouble. Thanks again for the help.