Assigned: Wednesday, February 1, 2006
Due: 8:00 a.m., Monday, February 6, 2006
Summary: In this assignment, you will extend your
simple version of the game Mad Libs.
Purpose: To give you an opportunity to explore issues
of input, output, and strings in Java.
Contents:
In a previous assignment you built a simple
game of Mad Libs. However, that game required that you hard-code
the Mad Lib template. It would be nicer (and more general) to have
your program read the template from a file. That's what you'll
do in this assignment.
Write a program the serves the role of the questioner in Mad Libs.
Your program should
- prompt the user for the name of a file that contains a Mad Libs template (such as the one above),
- prompt the user for the name of a file that will contain the result of the game,
- read the first file and prompt the user for any parts of speech that need to be filled in, and
- write the result of the game to the result file.
You can assume that the template file contains exactly four lines, that
each line contains exactly one thing to fill in, and that the thing to
fill in is surrounded by underscores.
I've written a template
that matches these specifications for the sample from the previous
assignment and another
template.
Please enter the name of the template file: johnjava.txt
Please enter the name of the result file: jj1.txt
Please enter a(n) verb: walk
Please enter a(n) adjective: superfluous
Please enter a(n) adjective: incredible
Please enter a(n) exclamation: wicked
Here is your story ...
John likes to walk with Java
because he thinks that Java is superfluous.
When things go well, John is incredible.
When things go badly, John yells "wicked!"
In the lab on input and output,
you practiced reading from and writing to files. You should therefore
be able to prompt for names of files and read and write from them. Note
that you will need two BufferedReader objects (one for
reading the user responses and one for reading from the file) and two
PrintWriter objects (one for printing prompts to the user
and one for printing to the result file).
You are likely to need at least four string variables, one for each
line of input.
In the lab on strings, you
wrote a program that segmented an input line by identifying the location
of a separator (in that case, a colon). You can use a similar technique
here.
- Find the index of the first underscore.
- Find the index of the second underscore.
- Extract the word that appears between the two underscores.
- Prompt for that word.
- Rebuild the line using everything before the first underscore, the
user response, and everything after the second underscore.
When you are satisfied with your work, you should submit it to me.
Email me the program.
When you ask questions, I'll try to put the answers here.
Wednesday, 1 February 2006 [Samuel A. Rebelsky]
- Created. Many parts were cribbed from an earlier assignment.
- Added hints.
;
Check with Bobby