Develop Reference

How can I add a placeholder to a random Int then pull a single digit from that Int in Java?

I am new to Java and programming all together.. I am trying to make a program that ciphers a number for the user. The user inputs 5 digits separately so I add them together to get a total. I need to pull the first digit and second digit of the total and enter it into (firstDigit+key)%10 and (secondDigit+key)%10. Then need to combine the answer to each equation together.
My total needs to be two digits, so even if the user enters all 1's which would total to be 5, I need it to be displayed and seen as 05 so that both equations have a digit to use. It needs to be two digits. I cant seem to figure how to enter a place holder. I was thinking about trying to use:
if (total < 10)
but then what?
Secondly, the method I used below seems like a terrible way to pull a single digit from a number. I think I changed the int total into a string so I can use .substring to pull the digits, then converted back to an int. Surprisingly it works. Is there a better way to do this knowing that the number is random?
String totalString = Integer.toString(total);
String stringDigit1 = totalString.substring(0,1);
String stringDigit2 = totalString.substring(1,2);
int firstDigitInt1 = Integer.parseInt(stringDigit1);
int firstDigitInt2 = Integer.parseInt(stringDigit2);
int encodedDigit1 = (firstDigitInt1+key)%10;
int encodedDigit2 = (firstDigitInt2+key)%10;
System.out.println("Your encoded Number is: " + encodedDigit1 + encodedDigit2);

Your method for obtaining the individual digits is good, and if you want to maintain it I believe your intuition is correct, it should suffice to say:
if (total < 10) {
firstDigitInt1 = 0
}
This will work out with your following math.
Your method with substrings is far from terrible, but in case you wanted something more sleek you can instead say:
int Digit1 = total / 10;
int Digit2 = total % 10;
Here, you can take advantage of integer truncation (where an integer won't remember decimal places) to get the first digit, which also solves the first problem: 5 / 10 = 0 (in terms of ints). For the second digit, it suffices to say modulo 10, as it is the remainder once the total is divided by 10.

Split a String variable into a random substring with a specified length

In java.
It should use the random number generator to return a randomly chosen substring of text that has the specified length. If the length is either negative or greater than the length of text, the method should throw an IllegalArgumentException. For example, chooseSubstring("abcde", 4, new Random()) should return "abcd" about half the time and "bcde" about half the time.
public static String chooseSubstring (String text, int length, Random rand)
{
int randomNum = rand.nextInt(length);
String answer = text.substring(randomNum);
return answer;
}
Basically, I want to return a substring from the variable text. The substring must be the length of the variable length. The beginning of this substring should start at a random location determined by a random number generator. My problem is that the random number generator is not making sure the substring is the correct length.
System.out.println(chooseSubstring("abcde", 4, new Random()));
Should return abcd and bcde about the same amount of times. Instead it is returning:
bcde
cde
de
abcde.
Any info about how to solve this would greatly help thanks!

Your code is taking a substring at a random index between 0 and length, exclusive. You have to specify the end index so it doesn't extend to the end of the string. You also need to reduce the range of the starting index so the end index doesn't go past the string:
int randomNum = rand.nextInt(text.length() - length + 1);
String answer = text.substring(randomNum, randomNum + length);

Generating Random Long value in Java

I am trying to generate two 9 digit long random long value in Java using the below code:
for (int i =0;i<2;i++) {
String axisIdStr = Long.toString((long)(System.nanoTime() * (Math.random() * 1000)));
System.out.println("######## axisIdStr "+axisIdStr);
String axId = axisIdStr.substring((axisIdStr.length() -9), axisIdStr.length()) ;
}
But when I run this in windows, i get two different numbers where as when run in mac, I get same two numbers. Why is this happening ?
Can you suggest a better way to generate the long values?

According to your requirement you need to generate 9 digit random numbers. As in the comment suggested you can do it using random.Below I have just given one solution to generate random number between two numbers.
long lowerLimit = 123456712L;
long upperLimit = 234567892L;
Random r = new Random();
long number = lowerLimit+((long)(r.nextDouble()*(upperLimit-lowerLimit)));

You could create an array a[] of int of size 9, and populate with random integers 0-9. Then sum the array up multiplying accordingly.
a[8]*1 + a[7]*10 + a[6]*100 ...
You need to make sure that a[0] only takes digits 1-9 tho...
To get even more random sequence, you Ideally should work on Strings, then you would be able to get 0 on the start position of your random "string", it won't be a number.
Or maybe generate somthing pseudo random and strip last 9 digits out of it.
That's the DIY version of what you could accomplish with what's already out there...
Regards

permutations of certain digits in Java

I realize permutations in programming language is a very frequently asked question, however I feel like my question is sort of unique.
I have received input of a certain length integer N and stored each digit in an array where the index of the array stores the number of times that digit occurs in N.
now I want to test if some function holds true with all permutations of N's original length with no leading zeroes. Ex:
int[] digits = new int[10];
String n = "12345675533789025";
for (char c : n.toCharArray())
digits[c-'0']++;
for (Long f : allPermutationsOf(digits))
if (someCondition(f))
System.out.println(f);
a precondition to the following code is that N must be less than 2^64-1, (long's maximum value.)
The question is, how would I take all permutations of the digits array and return a Long[] or long[] without using some kind of String concatenation? Is there a way to return a long[] with all permutations of digits[] in the "Integer scope of things" or rather using only integer arithmetic?

To elaborate on one of the above comments, putting a digit d in a given place in the resulting long is easy: d*1 puts it in the 1s place, d*1000 puts it in the thousands place, and in general d * (10^k) puts d into the k+1th digit. You have N total digits to fill, so you need to do permutations on the powers of 10 from 1 to 10^(N-1).

If you are expecting the permutations to be Longs anyway, instead of representing n as an array of counts, it might be easier to represent it as a Long too.
Here are a couple of ways you can generate the permutations.
Think of generating permutations as finding the next largest number with the same set of digits, starting from the number consisting of the sorted digits of n. In this case, the answers to this StackOverflow question is helpful. You can use arithmetic operations and modding instead of string concatenation to implement the algorithm there (I can provide more details if you like). A benefit of this is that the permutations you generate will automatically be in order.
If you don't care about the order of the permutations and you expect the number of digit duplicates to be small, you can use the Steinhaus-Johnson-Trotter algorithm, which (according to Robert Sedgewick) is the fastest algorithm for generating permutations of unique elements. To make sure duplicate permutations are not generated, you would have to distinguish every duplicate digit and only emit the permutations where they appear in order (i.e., if 2 appears three times, then create the elements 2_1, 2_2, 2_3 and make sure those three elements always appear in that order in an emitted permutation).

For the requirement, assuming that the length of N is n, we can generate all permutations by going from digit to digit, starting from 0 and end at n - 1. With 0 is the leading digit.
For each digit, we only go through each possibility (0 to 9) once , which will avoid duplicate permutation.
From digit x to digit x + 1, we can easily generate the current value by passing a number called current
For example: at digit 3, we have current = 1234, so at digit 4, if we choose 5 to be at digit 4, the current will be 1234*10 + 5 = 12345
Sample code in Java:
public void generate(int index, int length, int[] digits, long current, ArrayList<Long> result) {
//All the permutation will be stored in result ArrayList
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
if (digits[i] > 0 && (i != 0 || index != 0)) {
digits[i]--;
if (index + 1 == length) {//If this is the last digit, add its value into result
result.add(current * 10 + i);
} else {//else, go to next digit
generate(index + 1, length, digits, current * 10 + i, result);
}
digits[i]++;
}
}
}

JavaMe: Random number generation of 14 positive digits

I want to generate a random number of 14 positive digits only and I use the below function for it:
public void random()
{
Random number = new Random();
long l = number.nextLong();
number.setSeed(System.currentTimeMillis());
long num = Math.abs(number.nextInt())%999 + (l/100000); // problematic line
mTextBox.setString("" + num);
}
I very new to to JavaMe, I have made above function myself but I believe it is not working as expected. It also generates -ve numbers. Also sometimes one or two digits are missing in generated number resulting in 12 or 13 numbers not 14.
Any suggestions or improvement to the code will be highly appreciated.

If you want 14 digits, then you should use 14 calls to number.nextInt(10) - something like this:
public static String randomDigits(Random random, int length)
{
char[] digits = new char[length];
// Make sure the leading digit isn't 0.
digits[0] = (char)('1' + random.nextInt(9);
for (int i = 1; i < length; i++)
{
digits[i] = (char)('0' + random.nextInt(10));
}
return new String(digits);
}
Note that I've made the instance of Random something you pass in, rather than created by the method - this makes it easier to use one instance and avoid duplicate seeding. It's also more general purpose, as it separates the "use the string in the UI" aspect from the "generate a random string of digits".
I don't know whether Random.nextInt(int) is supported on J2ME - let me know if it's not. Using Math.abs(number.nextInt())%999 is a bad idea in terms of random distributions.

I didn't understand what you really want, the code suggests that you want a 3 digit number (%999).
Otherwise you can create a 14 digit number between 1000000000000000 and 9999999999999999 by
long num = 1000000000000000L + (long)(number.nextDouble() * 8999999999999999.0);
note (1 / 100000) is 0 (zero) since it is done by integer division, use (1.0 / 100000.0) for double division

long num = 10000000000000L+(long)(random.nextDouble()*90000000000000.0);
EDIT:
mTextBox.setString(MessageFormat.format("{0,number,00000000000000}",
new Object[] {new Long(num)}));

You are getting negative numbers because Random.nextInt() returns any 32-bit integer, and half of them are negative. If you want to get only positive numbers, you should use the expression Random.nextInt() & 0x7fffffff or simply Random.nextInt(10) for a digit.