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How can I prevent the user from entering the same letter in Hangman JAVA?

I am writing a hangman program and one of the requirements to a hangman game is preventing the user from entering the same letter twice.
I have written the code for that, but the problem is every time I enter a letter it says it is already entered. I need to only say it when it is entered the second time. You guys have any suggestions? I've been trying to fix this for the past few hours, I figured I could ask on here to find some help. I already looked at another Stackoverflow question regarding something similar to this but all those solutions have the same result.
In Java, how can I determine if a char array contains a particular character?
I've tried something like this but it won't work either:
boolean contains = false;
for (char c : store) {
if (c == character) {
System.out.println("Already Entered");
contains = true;
break;
}
}
if (contains) {
// loop to top
continue;
}
SECOND CLASS-
public void hangman(String word, int life) {
KeyboardReader reader = new KeyboardReader();
char[] letter = new char[word.length()];
char[] store = new char[word.length()];
String guess;
int i = 0, tries = 0, incorrect = 0, count = 1, v = 0;
while (i < word.length()) {
letter[i] = '-';

I would just use the String.contains() method:
String aString = "abc";
char aChar = 'a';
return aString.contains(aChar + "");
To keep track of guessed letters you can use a StringBuffer, appending them using a StringBuffer.append() to append new letters (maintaining state) and use the StringBuffer.toString() method to get the String representation when you need to do the comparison above.

Since Java 1.5 the class String contains the method contains(). My idea is to collect all entered letters into a string variable and using above method:
// My code line
String letterAlreadyEntered = "";
// Your code line
char character = reader.readLine().charAt(0);
// My code line
if (letterAlreadyEntered.contains("" + character) == true) {
//Put code here what ever you want to do with existing letter
} else {
letterAlreadyEntered += character;
}
In my opinion, this is an easier way to check for occurrences than in arrays, where you have to write your own check method.

Using a user inputted string of characters find the longest word that can be made

Basically I want to create a program which simulates the 'Countdown' game on Channel 4. In effect a user must input 9 letters and the program will search for the largest word in the dictionary that can be made from these letters.I think a tree structure would be better to go with rather than hash tables. I already have a file which contains the words in the dictionary and will be using file io.
This is my file io class:
public static void main(String[] args){
FileIO reader = new FileIO();
String[] contents = reader.load("dictionary.txt");
}
This is what I have so far in my Countdown class
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException{
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
letters = scan.NextLine();
}
I get totally lost from here. I know this is only the start but I'm not looking for answers. I just want a small bit of help and maybe a pointer in the right direction. I'm only new to java and found this question in an interview book and thought I should give it a .
Thanks in advance

welcome to the world of Java :)
The first thing I see there that you have two main methods, you don't actually need that. Your program will have a single entry point in most cases then it does all its logic and handles user input and everything.
You're thinking of a tree structure which is good, though there might be a better idea to store this. Try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
What your program has to do is read all the words from the file line by line, and in this process build your data structure, the tree. When that's done you can ask the user for input and after the input is entered you can search the tree.
Since you asked specifically not to provide answers I won't put code here, but feel free to ask if you're unclear about something

There are only about 800,000 words in the English language, so an efficient solution would be to store those 800,000 words as 800,000 arrays of 26 1-byte integers that count how many times each letter is used in the word, and then for an input 9 characters you convert to similar 26 integer count format for the query, and then a word can be formed from the query letters if the query vector is greater than or equal to the word-vector component-wise. You could easily process on the order of 100 queries per second this way.

I would write a program that starts with all the two-letter words, then does the three-letter words, the four-letter words and so on.
When you do the two-letter words, you'll want some way of picking the first letter, then picking the second letter from what remains. You'll probably want to use recursion for this part. Lastly, you'll check it against the dictionary. Try to write it in a way that means you can re-use the same code for the three-letter words.

I believe, the power of Regular Expressions would come in handy in your case:
1) Create a regular expression string with a symbol class like: /^[abcdefghi]*$/ with your letters inside instead of "abcdefghi".
2) Use that regular expression as a filter to get a strings array from your text file.
3) Sort it by length. The longest word is what you need!
Check the Regular Expressions Reference for more information.
UPD: Here is a good Java Regex Tutorial.

A first approach could be using a tree with all the letters present in the wordlist.
If one node is the end of a word, then is marked as an end-of-word node.
In the picture above, the longest word is banana. But there are other words, like ball, ban, or banal.
So, a node must have:
A character
If it is the end of a word
A list of children. (max 26)
The insertion algorithm is very simple: In each step we "cut" the first character of the word until the word has no more characters.
public class TreeNode {
public char c;
private boolean isEndOfWord = false;
private TreeNode[] children = new TreeNode[26];
public TreeNode(char c) {
this.c = c;
}
public void put(String s) {
if (s.isEmpty())
{
this.isEndOfWord = true;
return;
}
char first = s.charAt(0);
int pos = position(first);
if (this.children[pos] == null)
this.children[pos] = new TreeNode(first);
this.children[pos].put(s.substring(1));
}
public String search(char[] letters) {
String word = "";
String w = "";
for (int i = 0; i < letters.length; i++)
{
TreeNode child = children[position(letters[i])];
if (child != null)
w = child.search(letters);
//this is not efficient. It should be optimized.
if (w.contains("%")
&& w.substring(0, w.lastIndexOf("%")).length() > word
.length())
word = w;
}
// if a node its end-of-word we add the special char '%'
return c + (this.isEndOfWord ? "%" : "") + word;
}
//if 'a' returns 0, if 'b' returns 1...etc
public static int position(char c) {
return ((byte) c) - 97;
}
}
Example:
public static void main(String[] args) {
//root
TreeNode t = new TreeNode('R');
//for skipping words with "'" in the wordlist
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(".*\\W+.*");
int nw = 0;
try (BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(
"files/wordsEn.txt")))
{
for (String line; (line = br.readLine()) != null;)
{
if (p.matcher(line).find())
continue;
t.put(line);
nw++;
}
// line is not visible here.
br.close();
System.out.println("number of words : " + nw);
String res = null;
// substring (1) because of the root
res = t.search("vuetsrcanoli".toCharArray()).substring(1);
System.out.println(res.replace("%", ""));
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Output:
number of words : 109563
counterrevolutionaries
Notes:
The wordlist is taken from here
the reading part is based on another SO question : How to read a large text file line by line using Java?

String not populating properly

I am writing a program that is going to read a string from a file, and then remove anything that isn't 1-9 or A-Z or a-z. The A-Z values need to become lowercase. Everything seems to run fine, I have no errors, however my output is messed up. It seems to skip certain characters for no reason whatsoever. I've looked at it and tweaked it but nothing works. Can't figure out why it is randomly skipping certain characters because I believe my if statements are correct. Here is the code:
String dataIn;
int temp;
String newstring= "";
BufferedReader file = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("palDataIn.txt"));
while((dataIn=file.readLine())!=null)
{
newstring="";
for(int i=0;i<dataIn.length();i++)
{
temp=(int)dataIn.charAt(i);
if(temp>46&&temp<58)
{
newstring=newstring+dataIn.charAt(i);
}
if(temp>96&&temp<123)
{
newstring=newstring+dataIn.charAt(i);
}
if(temp>64&&temp<91)
{
newstring=newstring+Character.toLowerCase(dataIn.charAt(i));
}
i++;
}
System.out.println(newstring);
}
So to give you an example, the first string I read in is :
A sample line this is.
The output after my program runs through it is this:
asmlietis
So it is reading the A making it lowercase, skips the space like it is suppose to, reads the s in, but then for some reason skips the "a" and the "m" and goes to the "p".

You're incrementing i in the each of the blocks as well as in the main loop "header". Indeed, because you've got one i++; in an else statement for the last if statement, you're sometimes incrementing i twice during the loop.
Just get rid of all the i++; statements other than the one in the for statement declaration. For example:
newstring="";
for(int i=0;i<dataIn.length();i++)
{
temp=(int)dataIn.charAt(i);
if(temp>46&&temp<58)
{
newstring=newstring+dataIn.charAt(i);
}
if(temp>96&&temp<123)
{
newstring=newstring+dataIn.charAt(i);
}
if(temp>64&&temp<91)
{
newstring=newstring+Character.toLowerCase(dataIn.charAt(i));
}
}
I wouldn't stop editing there though. I'd also:
Use a char instead of an int as the local variable for the current character you're looking at
Use character literals for comparisons, to make it much clearer what's going on
Use a StringBuilder to build up the string
Declare the variable for the output string for the current line within the loop
Use if / else if to make it clear you're only expecting to go into one branch
Combine the two paths that both append the character as-is
Fix the condition for numbers (it's incorrect at the moment)
Use more whitespace for clarity
Specify a locale in toLower to avoid "the Turkey problem" with I
So:
String line;
while((line = file.readLine()) != null)
{
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(line.length());
for (int i = 0; i < line.length(); i++) {
char current = line.charAt(i);
// Are you sure you want to trim 0?
if ((current >= '1' && current <= '9') ||
(current >= 'a' && current <= 'z')) {
builder.append(current);
} else if (current >= 'A' && current <= 'Z') {
builder.append(Character.toLowerCase(current, Locale.US));
}
}
System.out.println(builder);
}

Space Replacement for Float/Int/Double

I am working on a class assignment this morning and I want to try and solve a problem I have noticed in all of my team mates programs so far; the fact that spaces in an int/float/double cause Java to freak out.
To solve this issue I had a very crazy idea but it does work under certain circumstances. However the problem is that is does not always work and I cannot figure out why. Here is my "main" method:
import java.util.Scanner; //needed for scanner class
public class Test2
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
BugChecking bc = new BugChecking();
String i;
double i2 = 0;
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("Please enter a positive integer");
while (i2 <= 0.0)
{
i = in.nextLine();
i = bc.deleteSpaces(i);
//cast back to float
i2 = Double.parseDouble(i);
if (i2 <= 0.0)
{
System.out.println("Please enter a number greater than 0.");
}
}
in.close();
System.out.println(i2);
}
}
So here is the class, note that I am working with floats but I made it so that it can be used for any type so long as it can be cast to a string:
public class BugChecking
{
BugChecking()
{
}
public String deleteSpaces(String s)
{
//convert string into a char array
char[] cArray = s.toCharArray();
//now use for loop to find and remove spaces
for (i3 = 0; i3 < cArray.length; i3++)
{
if ((Character.isWhitespace(cArray[i3])) && (i3 != cArray.length)) //If current element contains a space remove it via overwrite
{
for (i4 = i3; i4 < cArray.length-1;i4++)
{
//move array elements over by one element
storage1 = cArray[i4+1];
cArray[i4] = storage1;
}
}
}
s = new String(cArray);
return s;
}
int i3; //for iteration
int i4; //for iteration
char storage1; //for storage
}
Now, the goal is to remove spaces from the array in order to fix the problem stated at the beginning of the post and from what I can tell this code should achieve that and it does, but only when the first character of an input is the space.
For example, if I input " 2.0332" the output is "2.0332".
However if I input "2.03 445 " the output is "2.03" and the rest gets lost somewhere.
This second example is what I am trying to figure out how to fix.
EDIT:
David's suggestion below was able to fix the problem. Bypassed sending an int. Send it directly as a string then convert (I always heard this described as casting) to desired variable type. Corrected code put in place above in the Main method.
A little side note, if you plan on using this even though replace is much easier, be sure to add an && check to the if statement in deleteSpaces to make sure that the if statement only executes if you are not on the final array element of cArray. If you pass the last element value via i3 to the next for loop which sets i4 to the value of i3 it will trigger an OutOfBounds error I think since it will only check up to the last element - 1.

If you'd like to get rid of all white spaces inbetween a String use replaceAll(String regex,String replacement) or replace(char oldChar, char newChar):
String sBefore = "2.03 445 ";
String sAfter = sBefore.replaceAll("\\s+", "");//replace white space and tabs
//String sAfter = sBefore.replace(' ', '');//replace white space only
double i = 0;
try {
i = Double.parseDouble(sAfter);//parse to integer
} catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
nfe.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.println(i);//2.03445
UPDATE:
Looking at your code snippet the problem might be that you read it directly as a float/int/double (thus entering a whitespace stops the nextFloat()) rather read the input as a String using nextLine(), delete the white spaces then attempt to convert it to the appropriate format.
This seems to work fine for me:
public static void main(String[] args) {
//bugChecking bc = new bugChecking();
float i = 0.0f;
String tmp = "";
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("Please enter a positive integer");
while (true) {
tmp = in.nextLine();//read line
tmp = tmp.replaceAll("\\s+", "");//get rid of spaces
if (tmp.isEmpty()) {//wrong input
System.err.println("Please enter a number greater than 0.");
} else {//correct input
try{//attempt to convert sring to float
i = new Float(tmp);
}catch(NumberFormatException nfe) {
System.err.println(nfe.getMessage());
}
System.out.println(i);
break;//got correct input halt loop
}
}
in.close();
}
EDIT:
as a side note please start all class names with a capital letter i.e bugChecking class should be BugChecking the same applies for test2 class it should be Test2

String objects have methods on them that allow you to do this kind of thing. The one you want in particular is String.replace. This pretty much does what you're trying to do for you.
String input = " 2.03 445 ";
input = input.replace(" ", ""); // "2.03445"
You could also use regular expressions to replace more than just spaces. For example, to get rid of everything that isn't a digit or a period:
String input = "123,232 . 03 445 ";
input = input.replaceAll("[^\\d.]", ""); // "123232.03445"
This will replace any non-digit, non-period character so that you're left with only those characters in the input. See the javadocs for Pattern to learn a bit about regular expressions, or search for one of the many tutorials available online.
Edit: One other remark, String.trim will remove all whitespace from the beginning and end of your string to turn " 2.0332" into "2.0332":
String input = " 2.0332 ";
input = input.trim(); // "2.0332"
Edit 2: With your update, I see the problem now. Scanner.nextFloat is what's breaking on the space. If you change your code to use Scanner.nextLine like so:
while (i <= 0) {
String input = in.nextLine();
input = input.replaceAll("[^\\d.]", "");
float i = Float.parseFloat(input);
if (i <= 0.0f) {
System.out.println("Please enter a number greater than 0.");
}
System.out.println(i);
}
That code will properly accept you entering things like "123,232 . 03 445". Use any of the solutions in place of my replaceAll and it will work.
Scanner.nextFloat will split your input automatically based on whitespace. Scanner can take a delimiter when you construct it (for example, new Scanner(System.in, ",./ ") will delimit on ,, ., /, and )" The default constructor, new Scanner(System.in), automatically delimits based on whitespace.

I guess you're using the first argument from you main method. If you main method looks somehow like this:
public static void main(String[] args){
System.out.println(deleteSpaces(args[0]);
}
Your problem is, that spaces separate the arguments that get handed to your main method. So running you class like this:
java MyNumberConverter 22.2 33
The first argument arg[0] is "22.2" and the second arg[1] "33"
But like other have suggested, String.replace is a better way of doing this anyway.

How is this program coming along?

Instructions:
Write a program that will read a line of text that ends
with a period, which serves as a sentinel value. Display all the
letters that occur in the text, one per line and in alphabetical
order, along with the number of times each letter occurs in the text.
Use an array of base type int of length 26 so that the element at
index 0 contains the number of as. and index 1 contain number of bs etc.
package alphabetize;
import java.util.*;
public class Alphabetize
{
private static void number(String s)
{
int[] array = new int[26];
s = s.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(s);
for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); ++i)
{
if (s.charAt(i) >= 'A' && s.charAt(i) <= 'Z')
{
++array[s.charAt(i) - 'A'];
}
}
for (int i = 0; i < 26; ++i)
{
System.out.println("|" + (char) ('A' + i) + "|" + array[i] + "|");
}
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in);
String aString = ".";
while (true)
{
System.out.println("Please enter sentence with a period to end");
aString = keyboard.nextLine();
if (".".equals(aString))
{
System.exit(0);
}
number(aString);
}
}
}
Still having problem with the period thing.. it does not seem to work the way i did it.

Considering this is a homework and instructions are very specific, you should read the text character by character instead of using built-in functions
If your text file was something like
abcabca.
The output should be something a appears three times, b appears two times etc etc.
So your algo should be something like
Read next character
If char is period goto 5
If char is space goto 1.
If char is between a <-> z. update the counter in arr[0..25] and goto 1
output arr[0..25] one per line

Was it mandated that this assignment is done in Java? The whole idea of a "sentinal character" rather than just using a line terminator is pretty bizarre.
Anyway, you can achieve the behaviour you want by setting the delimiter of Scanner:
keyboard.useDelimiter("\\.");
As for the looping, a big hint is this:
int[] counts;
counts[chars[0] - 'a'] = counts[chars[0] - 'a'] + 1;
or simply
counts[chars[0] - 'a']++;
I'll leave it up to you to include that in a loop.
Edit
If you are looking for character-at-a-time input, I would suggest you use an InputStreamReader instead of Scanner for your input. Here's a basic skeleton of what that looks like:
Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
while (true) {
int nextInput = reader.read();
if (nextInput == -1) {
System.out.println("End of input reached without sentinal character");
break;
}
char nextChar = (char) nextInput;
//deal with next character
}
Still, read() will typically block until either the end of input is reached (CTRL-D or CTRL-Z from most consoles) or a new line is sent. Thus the sentinal character is of limited use since you still have to do something after typing ".".

You have to check whether period is there at the end or not. So the last character should be '.'.
Then take the length of string before last '.'.
For the counting part create an array like u are doing :
int [] name = new int[26]
where each index starting from 0, 25 corresponds to 'a' till 'z'.
Now you put the string characters in a loop and have to check what that character is like :
if its a 'a' : increase the value at index 0 by 1.
if its a 'd' : increase the value at index 3 by 1.
like wise.
later you display the whole array with a, z along with indexes from 0 till 25.
Suggestion: If its not required to use an array, and you can use any other data-structure you can implement the same in a HashMap very easily. by keeping 'a', 'z' as the keys and count as the corresponding values. and then retrieving and showing the values will also be easier.

You need an int array (e.g., int[] counts = new int[26];) After you read the input line, examine it character by character in a loop. If the character is a not period, then increment the appropriate element of the counts array. (If the character is a, then increment counts[0]; if it is b, increment counts[1]; etc. Hint: you can subtract a from the character to get the appropriate index.) When you find a period, exit the loop and print the results (probably using a second loop).