Due on Wednesday 30th January

You should submit solutions to this h/w via the cms system by 11pm on Wednesday. Since the primary point of this h/w is to ensure that everyone is comfortable writing a simple i/o program in Java, each person should sumbit their own work, but you are strongly encouraged to talk to folk to get such help as you need, whether they are course staff, fellow students, or others -- though do ensure that by the time you submit your work that you're comfortable with the ideas involved and feel that you could do it entirely yourself were you to be asked to.

Question 1:

This is in two related parts. Firstly you should write a simple Java program which will invite the user to enter a string of text at the keyboard and display some basic analysis of the text. All we're looking for in the first stage is to say

1. how many characters were entered,
2. how many words were entered (a 'word' is a string of characters separated by spaces ... include the intial word and final word),
3. what the average word length is (give this as a decimal).

When you have this working, add in code to be able to say what the most common non-space character is (if there are several with the same top frequency, then list them all).

The second part is to repeat the above, but this time reading from a file and writing the results to a file as well as displaying the results on the screen. The output file should be called "answers.txt", and the input file can be found at inputFile.txt

Clarification: Several folk have been asking what constitues an allowable 'letter' for a word when counting. Obviously it would be nice to exclude punctuation (although hyphens would count some of the time, and an apostrophe would count sometimes, and ...). As can be seen, it's not altogether easy to decide when an ascii character should count. So since this is meant as a relatively gentle first homework, I suggest that we take a pragmatic approach of counting all non-space characters (spaces, tabs, newlines, etc. 'are' spaces) as allowable characters for building a word. In this case the string "these 88 words have avg length 3.68 chars.." would have 8 'words' with "88", "3.68", and "chars.." being 'words'. Thus you need only separate a string via the space and tab (\t) characters, which should make things much easier for you when building a suitable if or switch statement.