Question

I wrote a program, what is compute the difference of two string or compute a hamming distance.

I run in debug mode. And I saw, the at the string first the first element of string is missing. But the string second is good!

When I tested the first’s length and second’s length is equal.

Forexample:
I typed this: 00011
And in debug mode it’s value only: 0011
. Or I typed this: “this”, in debug the real value is only “his”

Somebody can explain me, why missing the first element of string?

The code:

    while (Console.Read() != 'X')
    {
            string first = Console.ReadLine();
            string second = Console.ReadLine();

            int distance = 0;

            for (int i = 0; i < first.Length; i++)
            {
                if (first[i]!= second[i])
                {
                    ++distance;
                }
            }
            Console.WriteLine("Hamming distance is {0}.", distance);
        }

I tried modify the iteration, forexample the loop was ++i, or the first[i-1] but these aren’t solve my problem.

Answer 1

Console.Read() reads the first character from the buffer. This character will not be included in the ReadLine().

I would personally find a better way to end your program such as if first=="quit" or by some other syntaxic means.