Question

I would like to write a method that displays one’s initials in block letters, making large letters out of corresponding small letters, eg:

MMMMMMMMMM    CCCCCCCCC
MM  MM  MM    CCCCCCCCC
MM  MM  MM    CC
MM  MM  MM    CC
MM  MM  MM    CC
MM      MM    CCCCCCCCC
MM      MM    CCCCCCCCC

Any ideas as to how I should go about this?

Answer 1

The first step is to have a way of creating each individual letter (A, B, …, Z). Store these as String[]s. For example, your M would be:

{MMMMMMMMMM, MM  MM  MM, MM  MM  MM, MM  MM  MM, MM  MM  MM, MM      MM, MM      MM}

I’ve just taken all of the lines and stored them as an array. Now if you have 2 String[], say letter1 and letter2, you can ‘concatenate’ them like this:

String[] concat = new String[letter1.length];
for (int i = 0 ; i < concat.length ; i++)
    concat[i] = letter1[i] + "\t" + letter2[i]; 

Now you simply print:

for (String s : concat)
    System.out.println(s);

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In your case it would be something like this:

// letter1 and letter2 would be created by some other method that you must define
String[] letter1 = new String[]{"MMMMMMMMMM", "MM  MM  MM", "MM  MM  MM", "MM  MM  MM", "MM  MM  MM", "MM      MM", "MM      MM"};
String[] letter2 = new String[]{"CCCCCCCCC" , "CCCCCCCCC", "CC       ", "CC       ", "CC       ", "CCCCCCCCC", "CCCCCCCCC"};

String[] concat = new String[letter1.length];
for (int i = 0 ; i < concat.length ; i++)
    concat[i] = letter1[i] + "\t" + letter2[i];

for (String s : concat)
    System.out.println(s);