Question

I’m making a game and I need to make a method which checks if the specified cell is part of a horizontal consecutive sequence of cells containing the same character. The sequence of cells needs to be of length l. It is true if the cell is part of a horizontal sequence of length at least l, and false otherwise.

So far I have it that it detects if there are at least 5 consecutive cells with the same character anywhere in the row of the character specified. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

You can simply search for both sides using two loops (one per side) and check if the sum of consecutive cells is indeed l. Something along the lines of:

public static boolean checkPositionRow(char[][] a, int row, int col, int l) {
    int counter = 1; //starting from 1, because for a[row][col] itself
    char charAtPosition = a[row][col];
   //expand to the right as much as possible
    for (int i = col+1; i < a[row].length && a[row][i] == charAtPosition; i++) counter++;
   //expand to the left as much as possible
    for (int i = col-1; i >= 0 && a[row][i] == charAtPosition; i--) counter++;
    return counter >= l;
}