Question

I am writing a CSVParser program that seperates words at commas. I am currently trying to find and record the longest word that appears in the file. Here is my class.

import csv.CSVParser;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class RecordFormatter {

public static void main (String[] args) {
       CSVParser parser = new CSVParser(new File (args[0]));
       while (parser.hasNextLine()) {
              ArrayList<String> ls = parser.getNextLine();
              for (int i = 0; i<ls.size(); i++) {
                   System.out.print("|" + ls.get(i) + " ");
                   }
              System.out.print("|");
              System.out.println();
       }
      CSVParser parser1 = new CSVParser(new File (args[0]));
      ArrayList<Integer> maxCol = new ArrayList<Integer>();
      while (parser1.hasNextLine()) {
            ArrayList<String> ls1 = parser1.getNextLine();
            for (int i = 0; i<ls1.size(); i++) {
                 maxCol.add(ls1.get(i)); //Here is where my bug occurs.
            }
      }

}

}

I have created two CSVParsers and am trying to use the second of the two to record the length. I tried (as you can see above) storing the int length value of each word into another Arraylist, but I can’t seem to get it to work. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Without giving the solution, since this is homework…

Notice that you are keeping every length value rather than comparing the current length against a previous value to determine if it is longer and only then keeping it.

Seems like you need just a single maxLength Integer (or int) rather than a list since you just want the longest single word.

If you wanted the longest word per line, a List might then be appropriate.

Another option would be to use a SortedList and get the largest value (last value) in the list.