Question

Okay so the question is to read in the file and search through it and be able to find words with the letters you entered so for example I enter A??C all the words in the dictionary with A as the first letter and C as the fourth letter would be returned. It is supposed to be used to help solve crosswords

import java.io.*;
import java.util.Scanner;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        NewClass reader = new NewClass();
        String[] contents = reader.load("/home/se211012/CS211/text");

        Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
        System.out.println("enter word");
        String s = scan.nextLine();
        for (int i = 0; i < contents.length; i++) {

        }
    }
}

Reading in the file is fine I have a class that does that as you can see, but I don’t know where to go from here. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You should probably use a regular expression to achieve it.

Create your regex to match the words, and search for a match through the collection.

Note that in regular expressions, . means any character.

You might want to hava a look on the Matcher and Pattern classes as well.