Hello, I'm a high-school student taking beginning Java, and I'm currently working on my final project (a simple RPG). It's going pretty well, except for one part: is there a way to check if a String variable does not equal something? I know this example won't work, because you can't use ==  with Strings to compare two variables (usually), but is there another way to do this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

public static void genderE(String gender, int picNum)
   {
      
      while (gender != "male" || gender != "female")
         {
            System.out.println("You have entered an invalid gender. Please try again:");
            gender = In.getString();
         }
      
      if (gender.equalsIgnoreCase("male"))
         picNum += 0;
      else if (gender.equalsIgnoreCase("female"))
         picNum += 100;
      else
         System.out.println("You have entered an invalid gender. Please try again:");
   }

It still doesn't work, because I get errors just for that, no matter what I enter, even if it's right.

Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant with the single ! (extremely newbie-ish, and forgetful). That works, thanks.

... and so mystring.equals("Something") returns boolean and you can negate it with prefix ! .
!mystring.equals("Something") --- that means mystring is NOT equals to string "Something", as guys already said.