Question

So for a class we are having to make a hangman game that can take a user input for a word and then have another person solve for it. It has to be able to recognize multiple repeating letters in the word or I would be done. Below is my code, it works great until I remove the break statement in my checkformatch method so that it goes past the initial finding of a letter. With the break in there it never finds the second third etc repeated letters, without it, it returns that each letter that is not the letter searched is a miss and reduces my life count. What I’m needing is some hints on how to search my array for the letter that is inputted as a guess and return their index positions in the array without it thinking each character in the array that is not the one guessed is a wrong input. Thank you in advance.

package hangman;

import java.util.Scanner;

class Game {
int livesRemaining;
String letterGuessed;
String wordInput;
  char[] hiddenWord;
  char[] aOfWord ;

Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);
boolean isFound;
int a;


public Game()
{
    this.setLives(8);
    //this.output();

    System.out.println("Player 1 please enter the word to be searched: ");
    wordInput = input.nextLine();

    aOfWord = wordInput.toCharArray();

    hiddenWord = new char[aOfWord.length];

    for(int j = 0; j < hiddenWord.length; j++)
        hiddenWord[j] = '*';

    this.output();

    while(livesRemaining > 0)
    {
        System.out.println("Please choose a letter: ");
        letterGuessed = input.nextLine();

        this.checkForMatch(letterGuessed);
        if(isFound == true)
    {
        hiddenWord[a] = letterGuessed.charAt(0);
    }
    else
    {
        System.out.println("Is not found!");
        this.reduceLives();
    }
    this.output();


  }

}

public void setLives(int a)
{
    this.livesRemaining = a;
}

public void reduceLives()
{
    livesRemaining = livesRemaining -1;
    System.out.println("Lives remaining: " + this.getLives());

}

public int getLives()
{
    return livesRemaining;
}

public void output()
{
    System.out.println("Lives remaining: " + this.getLives());
    System.out.println("Word found so far ");

    for(int i = 0; i < hiddenWord.length; i++)
    {
        System.out.print(hiddenWord[i] + "\n");
    }

}

public void checkForMatch(String l)
{

    for(int i = 0; i < aOfWord.length; i++)
        {
            //System.out.println("Comparing " + l.charAt(0) + " To " + aOfWord[i]);
            if(l.charAt(0) == aOfWord[i])   
            { 
               isFound = true;
               a = i;
               break;
            }
            else
            {
                isFound = false;  
            } 
        }

}

}

Answer 1

Your algorithm seems fine. However, it will only get you the last matching character because a will be rewritten whenever he finds a matching character.
I think a really simple solution would be to do this in your checkForMatch method:

if(l.charAt(0) == aOfWord[i])   
{ 
    isFound = true;
    hiddenWord[i] = l.charAt(0);
}

and also this in your game method…

if(!isFound)
{
    System.out.println("Is not found!");
    this.reduceLives();
}

You don’t have to use this. by the way. That is only necessary in certain cases. Take a look at this.