Develop Reference

Java how do i save a random item returned from a string array as a variable?

Im relatively new to Java and cant seem to get a straight answer from my lecturer at college, so I apologise if this is a dumb question. I'm creating a level up screen for my assignment, and it needs to include an array.
I've created a string array called "randomTitle" containing a list of character titles, I need a button to pull a random title from my array list and display it on a JLabel on my level up screen, but am unsure how to save the random title returned as a variable in order to display it, can anyone help me?
Random ran = new Random();
String ary = randomTitle[ran.nextInt(randomTitle.length)];
titleJLabel.setText(String.valueOf(randomTitle));

Random rand = new Random();
int random = (int) (Math.random()*randomTitle.length);
titleJLabel.setText(randomTitle[random]);
So through a slow process of elimination, this ended up solving my issue, I tried setting the JLabel to ary to begin with, which displayed my entire array, useful to know but not what I was aiming for. I've tested the programme over and over now and it seems to be working perfectly fine, Thanks a lot guys!

From what I can tell, you're trying to set the JLabel to a random address in the string array randomTitle. You already have the answer, if that's your question. However, for some reason you seem to be setting the JLabel to String.valueOf(randomTitle). What you want to be doing is setting the JLabel to the random address, which you already have stored in ary. Try setting the JLabel to ary.
Good luck!

Here it is as a one-liner using nextInt
titleJLabel.setText(randomTitle[Math.random().nextInt(randomTitle.length)]);

Having problems with storing variable in classes

Please see ifmy logic is correct i do not know how to implement what i am trying to do. I am a beginner in java.
Game is a class which stores the Name and the Steps of that user after the game is complete.
[ First Method ]
private game[] gameArray = new game[10];
for(int i = 0; i <gameArray.length;i++){
gameArray[i].setName(nameTxt.getText());
gameArray[i].setpSteps(stepsCount);
}
By Clicking History Button they will get the previous 10 people's name and steps.
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,
"Player's Name No. of Steps"+
"\n"+gameArray[i].toString());
-The Problem:
1) This code limits to only previous 10 results is there anyway i can get all the previous results
2) This code is not working!
[ Second Method - This is also not working! ]
private game[] gameArray = new game[10];
// Storing the name of player[i]
gameArray[i].setName(nameTxt.getName());
// Storing the number of steps player[i] took.
gameArray[i].setpSteps(stepsCount);
//Displaying previous 10 players name and steps
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,
"Player's Name No. of Steps"+
"\n"+gameArray[i].toString());

Some points:
you can't directly convert an array to a String through toString() because it isn't supported in Java, you should use Arrays.toString(..)
Java arrays have static size, if you want to store the whole history you will need a dynamic data structure as an ArrayList<Game> or a LinkedList<Game>
name of classes should be capitalized (Game, not game)
without knowing the internals of your Game class it's impossible to tell what is not working and why it is not working, we don't even know what it is supposed to do exactly

using java to parse a csv then save in 2D array

Okay so i am working on a game based on a Trading card game in java. I Scraped all of the game peices' "information" into a csv file where each row is a game peice and each column is a type of attribute for that peice. I have spent hours upon hours writing code with Buffered reader and etc. trying to extract the information from my csv file into a 2d Array but to no avail. My csv file is linked Here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3625527/MonstersFinal.csv I have one year of computer science under my belt but I still cannot figure out how to do this.
So my main question is how do i place this into a 2D array that way i can keep the rows and columns?

Well, as mentioned before, some of your strings contain commas, so initially you're starting from a bad place, but I do have a solution and it's this:
--------- If possible, rescrape the site, but perform a simple encoding operation when you do. You'll want to do something like what you'll notice tends to be done in autogenerated XML files which contain HTML; reserve a 'control character' (a printable character works best, here, for reasons of debugging and... well... sanity) that, once encoded, is never meant to be read directly as an instance of itself. Ampersand is what I like to use because it's uncommon enough but still printable, but really what character you want to use is up to you. What I would do is write the program so that, at every instance of ",", that comma would be replaced by "&c" before being written to the CSV, and at every instance of an actual ampersand on the site, that "&" would be replaced by "&a". That way, you would never have the issue of accidentally separating a single value into two in the CSV, and you could simply decode each value after you've separated them by the method I'm about to outline in...
-------- Assuming you know how many columns will be in each row, you can use the StringTokenizer class (look it up- it's awesome and built into Java. A good place to look for information is, as always, the Java Tutorials) to automatically give you the values you need in the form of an array.
It works by your passing in a string and a delimiter (in this case, the delimiter would be ','), and it spitting out all the substrings which were separated by those commas. If you know how many pieces there are in total from the get-go, you can instantiate a 2D array at the beginning and just plug in each row the StringTokenizer gives them to you. If you don't, it's still okay, because you can use an ArrayList. An ArrayList is nice because it's a higher-level abstraction of an array that automatically asks for more memory such that you can continue adding to it and know that retrieval time will always be constant. However, if you plan on dynamically adding pieces, and doing that more often than retrieving them, you might want to use a LinkedList instead, because it has a linear retrieval time, but a much better relation than an ArrayList for add-remove time. Or, if you're awesome, you could use a SkipList instead. I don't know if they're implemented by default in Java, but they're awesome. Fair warning, though; the cost of speed on retrieval, removal, and placement comes with increased overhead in terms of memory. Skip lists maintain a lot of pointers.
If you know there should be the same number of values in each row, and you want them to be positionally organized, but for whatever reason your scraper doesn't handle the lack of a value for a row, and just doesn't put that value, you've some bad news... it would be easier to rewrite the part of the scraper code that deals with the lack of values than it would be to write a method that interprets varying length arrays and instantiates a Piece object for each array. My suggestion for this would again be to use the control character and fill empty columns with &n (for 'null') to be interpreted later, but then specifics are of course what will individuate your code and coding style so it's not for me to say.
edit: I think the main thing you should focus on is learning the different standard library datatypes available in Java, and maybe learn to implement some of them yourself for practice. I remember implementing a binary search tree- not an AVL tree, but alright. It's fun enough, good coding practice, and, more importantly, necessary if you want to be able to do things quickly and efficiently. I don't know exactly how Java implements arrays, because the definition is "a contiguous section of memory", yet you can allocate memory for them in Java at runtime using variables... but regardless of the specific Java implementation, arrays often aren't the best solution. Also, knowing regular expressions makes everything much easier. For practice, I'd recommend working them into your Java programs, or, if you don't want to have to compile and jar things every time, your bash scripts (if your using *nix) and/or batch scripts (if you're using Windows).

I think the way you've scraped the data makes this problem more difficult than it needs to be. Your scrape seems inconsistent and difficult to work with given that most values are surrounded by quotes inconsistently, some data already has commas in it, and not each card is on its own line.
Try re-scraping the data in a much more consistent format, such as:
R1C1|R1C2|R1C3|R1C4|R1C5|R1C6|R1C7|R1C8
R2C1|R2C2|R2C3|R2C4|R2C5|R2C6|R2C7|R3C8
R3C1|R3C2|R3C3|R3C4|R3C5|R3C6|R3C7|R3C8
R4C1|R4C2|R4C3|R4C4|R4C5|R4C6|R4C7|R4C8
A/D Changer|DREV-EN005|Effect Monster|Light|Warrior|100|100|You can remove from play this card in your Graveyard to select 1 monster on the field. Change its battle position.
Where each line is definitely its own card (As opposed to the example CSV you posted with new lines in odd places) and the delimiter is never used in a data field as something other than a delimiter.
Once you've gotten the input into a consistently readable state, it becomes very simple to parse through it:
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(new File("MonstersFinal.csv")));
String line = "";
ArrayList<String[]> cardList = new ArrayList<String[]>(); // Use an arraylist because we might not know how many cards we need to parse.
while((line = br.readLine()) != null) { // Read a single line from the file until there are no more lines to read
StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(line, "|"); // "|" is the delimiter of our input file.
String[] card = new String[8]; // Each card has 8 fields, so we need room for the 8 tokens.
for(int i = 0; i < 8; i++) { // For each token in the line that we've read:
String value = st.nextToken(); // Read the token
card[i] = value; // Place the token into the ith "column"
}
cardList.add(card); // Add the card's info to the list of cards.
}
for(int i = 0; i < cardList.size(); i++) {
for(int x = 0; x < cardList.get(i).length; x++) {
System.out.printf("card[%d][%d]: ", i, x);
System.out.println(cardList.get(i)[x]);
}
}
Which would produce the following output for my given example input:
card[0][0]: R1C1
card[0][1]: R1C2
card[0][2]: R1C3
card[0][3]: R1C4
card[0][4]: R1C5
card[0][5]: R1C6
card[0][6]: R1C7
card[0][7]: R1C8
card[1][0]: R2C1
card[1][1]: R2C2
card[1][2]: R2C3
card[1][3]: R2C4
card[1][4]: R2C5
card[1][5]: R2C6
card[1][6]: R2C7
card[1][7]: R3C8
card[2][0]: R3C1
card[2][1]: R3C2
card[2][2]: R3C3
card[2][3]: R3C4
card[2][4]: R3C5
card[2][5]: R3C6
card[2][6]: R3C7
card[2][7]: R4C8
card[3][0]: R4C1
card[3][1]: R4C2
card[3][2]: R4C3
card[3][3]: R4C4
card[3][4]: R4C5
card[3][5]: R4C6
card[3][6]: R4C7
card[3][7]: R4C8
card[4][0]: A/D Changer
card[4][1]: DREV-EN005
card[4][2]: Effect Monster
card[4][3]: Light
card[4][4]: Warrior
card[4][5]: 100
card[4][6]: 100
card[4][7]: You can remove from play this card in your Graveyard to select 1 monster on the field. Change its battle position.
I hope re-scraping the information is an option here and I hope I haven't misunderstood anything; Good luck!
On a final note, don't forget to take advantage of OOP once you've gotten things worked out. a Card class could make working with the data even simpler.

I'm working on a similar problem for use in machine learning, so let me share what I've been able to do on the topic.
1) If you know before you start parsing the row - whether it's hard-coded into your program or whether you've got some header in your file that gives you this information (highly recommended) - how many attributes per row there will be, you can reasonably split it by comma, for example the first attribute will be RowString.substring(0, RowString.indexOf(',')), the second attribute will be the substring from the first comma to the next comma (writing a function to find the nth instance of a comma, or simply chopping off bits of the string as you go through it, should be fairly trivial), and the last attribute will be RowString.substring(RowString.lastIndexOf(','), RowString.length()). The String class's methods are your friends here.
2) If you are having trouble distinguishing between commas which are meant to separate values, and commas which are part of a string-formatted attribute, then (if the file is small enough to reformat by hand) do what Java does - represent characters with special meaning that are inside of strings with '\,' rather than just ','. That way you can search for the index of ',' and not '\,' so that you will have some way of distinguishing your characters.
3) As an alternative to 2), CSVs (in my opinion) aren't great for strings, which often include commas. There is no real common format to CSVs, so why not make them colon-separated-values, or dash-separated-values, or even triple-ampersand-separated-values? The point of separating values with commas is to make it easy to tell them apart, and if commas don't do the job there's no reason to keep them. Again, this applies only if your file is small enough to edit by hand.
4) Looking at your file for more than just the format, it becomes apparent that you can't do it by hand. Additionally, it would appear that some strings are surrounded by triple double quotes ("""string""") and some are surrounded by single double quotes ("string"). If I had to guess, I would say that anything included in a quotes is a single attribute - there are, for example, no pairs of quotes that start in one attribute and end in another. So I would say that you could:
Make a class with a method to break a string into each comma-separated fields.
Write that method such that it ignores commas preceded by an odd number of double quotes (this way, if the quote-pair hasn't been closed, it knows that it's inside a string and that the comma is not a value separator). This strategy, however, fails if the creator of your file did something like enclose some strings in double double quotes (""string""), so you may need a more comprehensive approach.

Printing an ArrayList of Strings to a PrintWriter with word wrap

Some classmates and I are working on a homework assignment for Java that requires we print an ArrayList of Strings to a PrintWriter using word wrap, so that none of the output passes 80 characters. We've extensively Googled this and can't find any Java API based way to do this.
I know it's generally "wrong" to ask a homework question on SO, but we're just looking for recommendations of the best way to do this, or if we missed something in the API. This isn't the major part of the homework, just a small output requirement.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to wordwrap the ArrayList's toString since it's nicely formatted already.

Well, this is a first for me, it's the first time one of my students has posted a question about one of the projects I've assigned them. The way it was phrased, that he was looking for an algorithm, and the answers you've all shared are just fine with me. However, this is a typical case of trying to make things too complicated. A part of the spec that was not mentioned was that the 80 characters limit was not a hard limit. I said that each line of the output file had to be roughly 80 characters long. It was OK to go over 80 a little. In my version of the solution, I just had a running count and did a modulus of the count to add the line end. I varied the value of the modulus until the output file looked right. This resulted in lines with small numbers being really short so I used a different modulus when the numbers were small. This wasn't a big part of the project and it's interesting that this got so much attention.

Our solution was to create a temporary string and append elements one by one, followed by a comma. Before adding an element, check if adding it will make the string longer than 80 characters and choose whether to print it and reset or just append.
This still has the issue with the extra trailing comma, but that's been dealt with so many times we'll be fine. I was looking to avoid this because it was originally more complicated in my head than it really is.

I think that better solution is to create your own WrapTextWriter that wraps any other writer and overrides method public void write(String str, int off, int len) throws IOException. Here it should run in loop and perform logic of wrapping.
This logic is not as simple as str.substring(80). If you are dealing with real text and wish to wrap it correctly (i.e. do not cut words, do not move comas or dots to the next line etc) you have to implement some logic. it is probably not too complicated but probably language dependent. For example in English there is not space between word and colon while in French they put space between them.
So, I performed 5 second googling and found the following discussion that can help you.

private static final int MAX_CHARACTERS = 80;
public static void main(String[] args)
throws FileNotFoundException
{
List<String> strings = new ArrayList<String>();
int size = 0;
PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(System.out, true); // Just as example
for (String str : strings)
{
size += str.length();
if (size > MAX_CHARACTERS)
{
writer.print(System.getProperty("line.separator") + str);
size = 0;
}
else
writer.print(str);
}
}
You can simply write a function, like "void printWordWrap(List<String> strings)", with that algorithm inside. I think, it`s a good way to solve your problem. :)

small java problem

Sorry if my question sounds dumb. But some time small things create big problem for you and take your whole time to solve it. But thanks to stackoverflow where i can get GURU advices. :)
So here is my problem. i search for a word in a string and put 0 where that word occur.
For example : search word is DOG and i have string "never ever let dog bite you" so the string
would be 000100 . Now when I try to convert this string into INT it produce result 100 :( which is bad. I also can not use int array i can only use string as i am concatinating it, also using somewhere else too in program.
Now i am sure you are wondering why i want to convert it into INT. So here my answer. I am using 3 words from each string to make this kind of binary string. So lets say i used three search queries like ( dog, dog, ever ) so all three strings would be
000100
000100
010000
Then I want to SUM them it should produce result like this "010200" while it produce result "10200" which is wrong. :(
Thanks in advance

Of course the int representation won't retain leading zeros. But you can easily convert back to a String after summing and pad the zeros on the left yourself - just store the maximum length of any string (assuming they can have different lengths). Or if you wanted to get even fancier you could use NumberFormat, but you might find this to be overkill for your needs.
Also, be careful - you will get some unexpected results with this code if any word appears in 10 or more strings.

Looks like you might want to investigate java.util.BitSet.

You could prefix your value with a '1', that would preserve your leading 0's. You can then take that prefix into account you do your sum in the end.
That all is assuming you work through your 10 overflow issue that was mentioned in another comment.

Could you store it as a character array instead? Your using an int, which is fine, but your really not wanting an int - you want each position in the int to represent words in a string, and you turn them on or off (1 or 0). Seems like storing them in a character array would make more sense.