What does the error unexpected token 'public' mean? - salesforce

Question

I am a beginner in Apex and I need your help. What I am trying to do is creating a class that returns an array of formatted strings. The class has as a parameter the number of strings and it returns the array of strings formatted as:
Test 0, Test 1, ...Test n
The error I get is:
unexpected token 'public (line 1).
There might be more than one error in my code, if yes please feel free to let me know.
Thank you in advance!
public class StringArrayTest {
public static void generateStringArray(Integer n){
//List<String> stringArray = new List<String>();
for(Integer i=0; i<n; i++){
List<String>stringArray = new List<String>{'Test '+i};
}
return stringArray[];
}
}

Answer 1

There are a few things wrong with the code you have posted. When I tried this out I didn't get the error you mentioned, but here are the things to fix and get your code working:
The method should declare a return value of List<String>
Uncomment the line to initialize your list before the loop.
Return just the variable itself, no need to have the brackets. It's already a list.
Here is working code:
public class StringArrayTest {
public static List<String> generateStringArray(Integer n){
List<String> stringArray = new List<String>();
for(Integer i = 0; i < n; i++){
stringArray.add('Test ' + i);
}
return stringArray;
}
}