Question

I have to write a program in Java that compares two strings for dashes. The test only returns true if each string has the same amount of dashes in the same position in the strings.

Example:

Comparing the following two strings

String string1 = “two-twenty-nine”
String string2 = “ten-fourty-five and I’m hungry.”

with the above criteria would return true. It doesn’t matter whether one string is longer than the other.

Any assistance would be appreciated!

I have tried:
– converting the strings to char arrays and then comparing the indexes
– Using String.indexOf() for each string, and then creating a variable int newStart = String.indexOf() with the index of the previous dash as the new starting point to look from

`   public static void sameDashes(String string1, String string2) {
    int count = 0;
    char index1 = ' ';
    char index2 = ' ';
    char dash = '-';
    char[] string1Array = string1.toCharArray();
    char[] string2Array = string2.toCharArray();
    while (count < string1Array.length && count < string2Array.length) {
        if (string1Array[index1] == dash && string2Array[index2] == dash) {
            System.out.println("true");
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Since I suspect this is homework, I’m just going to outline a solution.

• Iterate through string1 using the indexOf method, and get a List of Integers representing the positions of the dashes.
• Iterate through string2 in the same manner. (You could call a general method twice. Once with string1 and once with string2.)
• Compare your Lists, and see if they have the same size().
• If they’re the same size, loop through both lists and see if the positions are the same.