How do I avoid this OutOfBounds Error when an original array is less than the fixed length of a new array?

For this task I'm working on I have two arrays initialised:

private int[] numbers;
numbers = new int[] {2, 3, 1, 4, 7, 6, 5, 2}
private int[] newNumbers = new int[8];

What happens with this is that I've got a For Loop that assigns the numbers from the original numbers array into the newNumbers array.

The Numbers array can vary in length with a maximum of 24 numbers and minimum of 1 number..

I've got code written that will divide the numbers (no matter the length of the numbers array) into the newNumbers array and the newNumbers array will always have a fixed length of 8.

I've got it working for dividing the numbers when there are eight numbers or more however when I use my For Loop to try and divide the numbers when there are less than 8 I get an out of bounds error.

The For Loop I'm using (for the first 8 numbers, the next 8 and the 8 after that use their own loops) is:

for (int i = 0; i < this.newNumbers.length; i++)
	{
		this.newNumbers[i] = this.numbers[i];
	}

It works as needed except for when there are less than 8 numbers and I'll just get an OutOfBounds array. I'm not sure whether that's due to the second array having a fixed length of 8 or not but I thought the more experienced Java programmers here would be able to offer some advice.

> ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException indicates that an array has been
> accessed with an illegal index.

In your case the array numbers is accessed by an index greater then its length.

As mentioned in the comments you just need to check that the index i doesn't overflow the numbers array. This is how you can do it:

int[] numbers = new int[] { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
int[] newNumbers = new int[8];

for (int i = 0; i < newNumbers.length; i++) {
    if (i < numbers.length) {
        newNumbers[i] = numbers[i];
    } else {
        newNumbers[i] = 0;
    }
}
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(newNumbers));

The output is:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0]

Arrays always need a static size. You will always need to pad the arrays with zeroes if size of arrays is less than 8.

I suggest you try using List in java.

List<Integer> newNumbers = new ArrayList();
int maxSize = 8;
for(int i=0;i<numbers.length;i++){
     newNumbers.add(numbers[i]);
     if(newNumbers.size()==maxSize){
          break;
     }
}

List is more dynamic. If you are dealing with a method that accepts array only then you can always convert the list back to array.

One solution is just to loop over the numbers array length rather than the newNumbers array as this will pad the rest of the newNumbers array with 0s:

for (int i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++)
  {
    newNumbers[i] = numbers[i];
  }

Another option is to use arraycopy:

System.arraycopy(numbers, 0, newNumbers, 0, shortNumbers.length);

Here the 0s are the start positions of each array where numbers is the destination and numbers is the array to be copied.
This is the much faster than the equivalent loop written out longhand in Java.