title: Using ints/doubles and Strings in the same Scanner variable
body: <p>So I'm new to java programming, coming from Python, and there's a few concepts that I can't quite understand. </p>
  
  <p>I'm writing a program which allows the user to enter as many numbers as they want and the program should output the average of all of the numbers. I used a while loop to loop through the inputs by the user as many times as they wanted, but I needed a way of exiting the loop so that the program could proceed with calculating the average of all of the inputs. I decided that if the user enters an "=" sign instead of a number, then the program would break out of the loop, but since the Scanner variable was looking for a double, and the "=" sign is not a number, I would have to make it a String. But because the Scanner is looking for a double, the program threw an error when it encountered the "=". </p>
  
  <p>How can I get the program to exit the loop when the user types "="? I know I could just allow the user to enter a number that breaks the loop, but if it was a real world program and the user entered a number, it would count that number along with the previous ones when calculating the average. The code I have so far is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import java.util.Scanner;
  // imports the Scanner class
  
  public class Average{
      public static void main(String[] args){
          double num, total = 0, noOfInputs = 0, answer;
          Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
  
          while(true){
              System.out.print("Enter number: ");
              //Prompts the user to enter a number
  
              num = scanner.nextDouble();
              /*Adds the number inputted to the "num" variable. This is the
              source of my problem*/
  
              if(num.equals("=")){
                  break;}
              /*The if statement breaks the loop if a certain character is
              entered*/
  
              total = total + num;
              //Adds the number inputted to the sum of all previous inputs
  
              noOfInputs++;
              /*This will be divided by the sum of all of the numbers because
                Number of inputs = Number of numbers*/
          }
  
          answer = total / noOfInputs;
          System.out.print(answer);
  
          }
  }
  </code></pre>