Help testing two words, then printing the cross of where the same chars are..

Question

i'm trying to make a program that reads two English words from the command line, then outputs all possible ways the words can cross eachother. and print an error message if they do not cross. i want to use the charAt and length methods.. not sure where to even start..

here's what i got so far:

public class Cross2
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {

    // create two dimentional array that stores input
    private String[][] cross = new String[w1pos][w2pos];

    // get input from user
    Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);
    System.out.println("Enter two words: ");
    String word1 = input.next();
    String word2 = input.next();

    // loop through length of words
    for(int w1pos = 0; w1pos < word1.length(); w1pos++) {
        for(int w2pos = 0; w2pos < word2.length(); w2pos++) {

        // if characters are equal, print the array
        if (word1.charAt(w1pos) == word2.charAt(w2pos))
             System.out.println(cross[w1pos][w2pos]);
        }
    }

Answer 1

i think so. i would need to loop through the length of the string, then use charAt(i) to print each character.

That's a good start.

and yes crossing as in letter matching.. so i need to compare each character using charAt for each position in each of the two words

That's good. Hint: So how many loops?

and print an error message if they do not cross

Hint: ... and how will you do that?

Don't answer my questions. They are hints. Write some code based one them.

Answer 2

So for the words "abra" and "cadabra", would the output look like this?

c   
abra
d   
a   
b   
r   
a   


c   
a   
d   
abra
b   
r   
a   


c   
a   
d   
a   
b   
r   
abra


 c  
 a  
 d  
 a  
abra
 r  
 a  


  c 
  a 
  d 
  a 
  b 
abra
  a 


   c
abra
   d
   a
   b
   r
   a


   c
   a
   d
abra
   b
   r
   a


   c
   a
   d
   a
   b
   r
abra

If so, I would recommend that you use a two-dimensional array of characters filled with spaces that you write the words into before displaying. Printing each character one at a time might be significantly more difficult.

[edit:]

I don't know Java so I couldn't use functions and I couldn't write much more than what you had, but I hope this helps.

// This is a comment explaining what the code does.

.

/* This is a comment explaining what you need to add to make the code work. */

.

public class Cross2
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);
        System.out.println("Enter two words: ");
        String word1 = input.next();
        String word2 = input.next();
        String[][] cross = new String[word1.length()][word2.length()];
        /* Fill 'cross' with spaces */
        for(int w1pos = 0; w1pos < word1.length(); w1pos++) {
            for(int w2pos = 0; w2pos < word2.length(); w2pos++) {
                if (word1.charAt(w1pos) == word2.charAt(w2pos)) {
                    // Store 'word1' horizontally into 'cross'.
                    for(int w1posAgain = 0; w1posAgain < word1.length(); w1posAgain++) {
                        /* Store 'word1.charAt(w1posAgain)' horizontally into 'cross'
                        at row 'w2pos' and column 'w1posAgain'. */
                    }
                    // Store 'word2' vertically into 'cross'.
                    for(int w2posAgain = 0; w2posAgain < word2.length(); w2posAgain++) {
                        /* Store 'word2.charAt(w2posAgain)' vertically into 'cross'
                        at row 'w2posAgain' and column 'w1pos'. */
                    }
                    for(int w1posAgain = 0; w1posAgain < word1.length(); w1posAgain++) {
                        for(int w2posAgain = 0; w2posAgain < word2.length(); w2posAgain++) {
                            System.out.print(cross[w1posAgain][w2posAgain]);
                        }
                        System.out.println();
                    }
                    /* Fill 'cross' with spaces.
                    Yes, really.*/
                }
            }
        }
    }
}