What is File Expansion? In many computer languages (be they for programming, text formatting or some other application) you can specify in a le A to include the expanded contents of some other file B. In C and C++ (which you do not need to know), this feature is implemented with the #include directive.
Suppose we have a file called root.txt which looks like this:
<some-text-before-include.>
#include "myFile.txt"
<some-text-after-include.>
The process of file expansion starting from the file root.txt produces a new file which has all the text before the #include directive followed by the (expanded) contents of the file myFile.txt followed by the remainder of the file root.txt of the le myFile.txt.
This allows us to stitch together multiple existing files to create another file. In addition, if we want some text repeated in the final output, we just include that file multiple times rather than cutting and pasting (further, if we want to edit that text, we only have to do it in one place).
Why do we say the expansion process is recursive? Because the included files (like myFile.txt) above may itself have #include directives in it and so on! In this project we will use this same directive, but for arbitrary files (not just C or C++).
I'm fairly new to java(only learned basics 2 months ago). I'm in this class and it's expecting us to know some advanced concepts. I'm really lost here. Don't even know where to start. Can anyone tell me where to start? How to think about this problem? I am a java novice; so I'm having difficulty breaking it into steps. Can anyone help me get started? Thanks!