Question

Working with a Visual Basic.NET console application that features a VERY BASIC natural language recognition function-it only has to work with specific fields of words so it wasn’t that hard. I got the logic all lay out on paper, but I’ve encountered a problem.

I want the application to check if the user input is only consist of valid words.

When the user inputs something, I used a function to cut it down to only alphanumeric characters, and used the string.split method to create an array that contains separate words the user input. What I wish to do now is to compare the input array to another array (a full set of valid words), and return an error message if the input array contains only elements that exist in the valid words array.

For instance, if all valid words are “ALPHA”, “BETA” and “GAMMA”.
When the use inputs something like “ALPHA BETA”-the program will accept the input.
If the input is “APPLES” then it will return an error message because the string APPLE is not a member of the valid words array.

I hope I’ve made my question clear enough, anyone please help. Thanks.

Answer 1

Maybe you are looking for something like the All()-Method, which checks if each element in a collection satisfies a condition. Consider the following example:

Dim validWords = {"ALPHA", "BETA", "GAMMA"}

Dim thisIsNotValid = {"ALPHA", "APPLES"}.All(Function(word) validWords.Contains(word))

Dim thisIsValid = {"ALPHA", "BETA"}.All(Function(word) validWords.Contains(word))

thisIsNotValid will evaluate to False, and thisIsValid will evaluate to True.