Question

Looking for help with a basic array problem. Program has to read a sentence and store the frequencies of the word lengths in an array and then print out how many words are 1 letter words, 2 letter words etc.

I’m a pretty raw java programmer but have made a stab at it below would greatly appreciate some guidance. What I have seems to compile but spits out some garbled hex when I run the program and enter a sentence.

When I enter a sentence into the program I get an output like this:

[I@eb42cbf
[I@eb42cbf
[I@eb42cbf
[I@eb42cbf
[I@eb42cbf
[I@eb42cbf

My code:

class WordCount
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        int wordList[] = new int[20];
        System.out.println("Please enter a sentence.");

        for (int i = 0; i <= wordList.length; i++)
        {
            String s = Console.readToken();
            int x = s.length();
            wordList[x]++;
        }

        int x = 1;

        while (x < wordList.length)
        {
            if (wordList[x] > 0)
                System.out.println(x + "-letter words: " + wordList[x]);
            x++;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Here are my suggestions:

• use a Scanner instead of your Console.readToken, which is not part of the standard JDK
• use standard variable names (i for a counter is better than x)
• the rest of your code works fine
• but I would use a for loop instead of the while because you know how many times you need to loop

Here is my version – The changes are: use of a scanner, renaming x into i and changing the while loop into a for loop:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    int wordList[] = new int[20];
    System.out.println("Please enter a sentence.");
    Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in); //Use a scanner, part of the standard JDK

    for (int i = 0; i <= wordList.length; i++) {
        String s = scanner.next(); //reads the next string
        int length = s.length();
        wordList[length]++;
    }

    for (int i = 0; i < wordList.length; i++) { //use a for loop
        if (wordList[i] > 0) {
            System.out.println(i + "-letter words: " + wordList[i]);
        }
    }
}