title: How do I fix an "Illegal start of expression" error in Java?
body: <p>I am getting an "Illegal start of expression" error in the following code at the location marked by a comment. How can I correct this error?</p>
  
  <pre><code>class planetUfo {
      public static void main (String[] args) {
          // having data for counting the index
          char letters[] = {'A','B','C','D','E','F','G','H','I','J','K','L','M','N','O','P','Q','R','S','T','U','V','W','X','Y','Z'};
  
          // initial data
          String[] groups = {"COMETQ", "ABSTAR"};
          String[] comets = {"HVNGAT", "USACO"};
  
  
                                                 // Problem here!
          // to count the index
          private void countIndex ( String group, String comet ) {  
                                          // I get here "illegal start of an expression"
  
  
  
              // to have two words in the array
              char[] name = { group, comet };
              // to go though the words one by one in the block of the array
              int k = 0;
              for ( int k : name[k] ) {
                  // to save each letter to an array
                  char[] words = name[k].toCharArray();
  
                  int sum = 1;
                  // to loop through each character in the word
                  for ( int i = 0; i &lt; words.length; i++) {
                      // to loop through each necessary character in the alphabets
                      int j = 0;
                      for ( int j = 0; j &lt; letters.length; j++ ) {
                          while ( letters[j] !== words[i] ) { 
                              // to look the index of the letter in the word
                              int indexNumber = j;
                              sum = sum * (indexNumber + 1);
                              index[k] = sum;
                              j++;
                          }
                      }
                  }
              }
          }
      }
  }
  </code></pre>