Question

I am writing a program in Visual Basic 2010 that lists how many times a word of each length occurs in a user-inputted string. Although most of the program is working, I have one problem:

When looping through all of the characters in the string, the program checks whether there is a next character (such that the program does not attempt to loop through characters that do not exist). For example, I use the condition:

If letter = Microsoft.VisualBasic.Right(input, 1) Then

Where letter is the character, input is the string, and Microsoft.VisualBasic.Right(input, 1) extracts the rightmost character from the string. Thus, if letter is the rightmost character, the program will cease to loop through the string.

This is where the problems comes in. Let us say the string is This sentence has five words. The rightmost character is an s, but an s is also the fourth and sixth character. That means that the first and second s will break the loop just as the others will.

My questions is whether there is a way to ensure that only the last s, or whatever character is the last one in the string can break the loop.

Answer 1

There are a few methods you can use for this, one as Neolisk shows; here are a couple of others:

Dim breakChar As Char = "s"
Dim str As String = "This sentence has five words"

str = str.Replace(".", " ")
str = str.Replace(",", " ")
str = str.Replace(vbTab, " ")
' other chars to replace

Dim words() As String = str.ToLower.Split(New Char() {" "}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
For Each word In words
    If word.StartsWith(breakChar) Then Exit For
    Console.WriteLine("M1 Word: ""{0}""  Length: {1:N0}", word, word.Length)
Next

If you need to loop though chars for whatever reason, you can use something like this:

Dim breakChar As Char = "s"
Dim str As String = "This sentence has five words"

str = str.Replace(".", " ")
str = str.Replace(",", " ")
str = str.Replace(vbTab, " ")
' other chars to replace

'method 2
Dim word As New StringBuilder
Dim words As New List(Of String)

For Each c As Char In str.ToLower.Trim

    If c = " "c Then
        If word.Length > 0 'support multiple white-spaces (double-space etc.)
            Console.WriteLine("M2 Word: ""{0}""  Length: {1:N0}", word.ToString, word.ToString.Length)
            words.Add(word.ToString)
            word.Clear()
        End If
    Else
        If word.Length = 0 And c = breakChar Then Exit For
        word.Append(c)
    End If
Next

If word.Length > 0 Then
    words.Add(word.ToString)
    Console.WriteLine("M2 Word: ""{0}""  Length: {1:N0}", word.ToString, word.ToString.Length)
End If

I wrote these specifically to break on the first letter in a word as you ask, adjust as needed.