ITEC 120 2008fall aaray, ejderrick, ibarland, jmdymacek

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hw08
Translating many words

Due Nov.12 (Wed).

This is an individual homework: Although it uses work from lab09b—Pig La(b)tin I (If you want it, here is a pig-latin solution, as given-and-fixed-up in lab10b—debugging), you are not to work with your lab partner. (As ever, you can discuss the problem and approaches with others, but you have to write the code entirely on your own.)

For this assignment, we'll write a program which translates an entire message into Pig Latin. We'll start with the file we wrote in lab09b—Pig La(b)tin I, and add more methods to it. (Be sure you got a copy of that file which you and your lab partner worked on; alternately, a solution will be provided here soon.)

By the way, we will not duplicate code from that program; instead, we'll repeatedly call that method to translate a single word. Ere'shay owhay:

• Write a method which takes in a String, and counts how many punctuation characters it has. For purposes of this assignment, punctuation is: any character in the string ".?!,;:". (This is similar to, but different from, one of the methods you wrote in lab.)

10am and Noon Sections (Dr Derrick)

• Write a method which tells the user to enter a message, and then translates the message to Pig Latin. Finally, your program finishes by reporting: (a) how many words were translated total, and (b) how many total characters of punctuation were processed.

  For example, here's a possible transcript, where the user's input is shown in green:

  Enter a message to be translated: Four score and seven years ago, our ourFay orescay anday evensay earsyay ago,ay ouray forefathers did orefathersfay idday some pretty rad stuff. omesay ettypray adray uff.stay control-D 13 words and 2 punctuation marks handled.

  Clarification: The user's green text might appear on the same line as the previous output; that's fine. Other options include:
  • Have your program print the pig-latin with only one word per line; or,
  • As the user, you can always hit 'return' an extra time to make things look nicer, since Scanner's next() method ignores all whitespace. Or,
  • A few points of extra credit, if you do get your program to print a newline for each newline the user entered.¹

  Here's another input; note how our program reports “1 word …”, and not the (grammatically incorrect) “1 words …”:

  Enter a message to be translated: Aloha,ha,ha...? control-D Aloha,ha,ha...?ay 1 word and 6 punctuation marks handled.

9am section (Dr Barland)

• Write a method which tells the user to enter a message, and then repeatedly reads in words — remembering all of them in a list or array — until the end-of-intput is reached² (Your program does not need to remember how many spaces or return-characters occur between words.)
• Then, after the entire message has been entered, your program prints out each word of the original message, translated into pig latin.

  Note: the methods you wrote in lab should occur once in your program. If you want to convert a word into pig latin, call the method from lab, rather than writing/pasting any of that code again.

• Then, your program prints out the original (English) message, but with the words in reverse order.
• Finally, your program finishes by reporting: (a) how many words were translated total, and (b) how many total characters of punctuation were processed.

• For example, here's a possible transcript, where the user's input is shown in green:

  Enter a message to be translated: Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers did some pretty rad stuff. control-D ourFay orescay anday evensay earsyay ago,ay ouray orefathersfay idday omesay ettypray adray uff.stay stuff. rad pretty some did forefathers our ago, years seven and score Four 13 words and 2 punctuation marks handled.

  (Your program might have extra spaces at the start/end of the output, if using arrays instead of lists.)

  Here's another input; note how our program reports “1 word …”, and not the (grammatically incorrect) “1 words …”:

  Enter a message to be translated: Aloha,ha,ha...? control-D Aloha,ha,ha...?ay Aloha,ha,ha...? 1 word and 6 punctuation marks handled.

Extra credit options

There are many ways to improve this assignment. We'll offer some extra-credit, but don't start working on these until you have your regular program fully working. You can do any of these options; you don't need to do A before trying B, etc..

1. Extra credit: handle capital letters correctly.
2. Extra credit: Handle punctuation better: if you are translating a word which ends in punctuation character³, place the 'ay' before the punctuation. That is, “dang!” should translate to “angday!”, instead of “ang!day”.
3. Extra credit: if a word has multiple punctuation characters, do something reasonable. (Two approaches that seem reasonable to me: “System.err.println...gesundheit!” might be translated into “ystemSay.err.println...gesundheit!”, or (for extra cool awesomeness) it might be translated into “ystemSay.erray.intlnpray...esundheitgay!”.
4. Challenge Extra credit: Write a method which can translate a web page into pig latin.
   It takes two Strings as input — the URL to read from, and the name of a file to write the translated html to.

   It turns out, having a scanner read from a web page (rather than System.in) is easy. However, web pages are more than just words of text; web pages contain markup to indicate the structure of the document (where emphasized text should start and end, where to insert horizontal lines, etc.). Thus, web pages are written in “HTML” — “hypertext markup language”. We need to translate the regular information into pig latin, but leave this markup information untouched.

   More information you need is here.

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©2008, Ian Barland, Radford University Last modified 2008.Nov.20 (Thu)

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