|
Overview
Specifications
After reading and printing the puzzle, read in word strings one per line. For each word, look for its first letter in the puzzle. Whenever the first letter is found, print the row and column coordinates where it was found. If the first letter is not found anywhere in the puzzle, print a message saying so. Continue reading words until end of file. You must break the problem into several small methods where each method does one conceptual action. Have each method do one thing well. |
Input from file 6 9 lionsraeb stawnelpa dnawsgaad inergionn ozocatkda ohawktoap Input from user dog swan zebra quail horse frog |
Output l i o n s r a e b s t a w n e l p a d n a w s g a a d i n e r g i o n n o z o c a t k d a o h a w k t o a p dog could start at 3,1 dog could start at 3,9 dog could start at 5,8 swan could start at 1,5 swan could start at 2,1 swan could start at 3,5 zebra could start at 5,2 quail not found horse could start at 6,2 frog not found |
Steps to Solving the Problem
Create findWords method. After reading and printing the puzzle, your program should begin finding words in the puzzle. To separate the building of the puzzle from finding the words, create a findWords method. This method takes in the puzzle array as its only parameter. Call it from main.
Read words. In findWords, write a while loop to read words from standard input. Give a short prompt for the user. If you are running the program under Linux, type control-d when typing words from the keyboard to indicate there is no more input. If you are running it using Windows, type control-z instead. Remember the Scanner member methods of hasNext( ) and next( ). For testing purposes, print the word inside the loop. Perhaps count how many words were read and print a total. Save, compile, and test.
Start a locationInPuzzle method. This method returns a String describing where the word is found in the puzzle. If the word is found, that information is in the returned string. If the word is not found, the returned string is empty. It takes in the puzzle and the word as its parameters. Have this method return an empty string for now.
Call that method from findWords saving the answer as a string. Depending on whether the answer is empty or not, print the answer or a message about the word not being found. Because locationInPuzzle isn't searching, no words are found. Yet.
Complete locationInPuzzle method.
The locationInPuzzle method should go through the entire useful puzzle
(carefully think about the bounds).
At each location, it asks the searchAt method (see below)
to describe whether the word is found there and adds that to its answer.
locationInPuzzle has two nested for loops to visit each puzzle location.
Write simple version of searchAt method.
The searchAt method takes a puzzle, a word, a row number, and a column number and
builds a string saying word could start at row,column if it might and
leaving the string empty otherwise.
Don't print here.
For now, just check the first character of word
and build a string describing the word and location if the characters match.
For example:
ham could start at 1,1
Repair problems. Before submitting your final version, check that your program uses methods extensively, has appropriate comments for each method, and is indented appropriately to match the program's control structure.
A better word list for this puzzle is: lion, bear, tiger, horse, cat, dog, swan, koala, panda, rat, and hawk. There are interesting leftovers.
Submission
Submit your program as the findFirst assignment.