Using Scanner to count paragraphs in a text file.

Hello everyone. I have been trying to finish this homework assignment for a while now and I'm running into problems. I have to create a program that reads a simple text file and counts the number of words, sentences, lines, and paragraphs. The program then needs to output the results to another text file.

I have the count for words, lines, and sentences working fine; but paragraphs are really stumping me. According to my professor: "a paragraph is basically a line with words followed by a line with nothing (or, if you wish, the other way around)."

The first thing I thought of was to use scanner and feed the text into a string line by line, then search the string for \n or \r.

Code:

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while (paraScan.hasNextLine()){
        line = paraScan.nextLine();
        if (line.contains("\n") || line.contains("\r")){
                paraCount++;
            }
        }

...

System.out.println("Paragraph count: " + paraCount);

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Technically, this would just count the number of lines; I just wanted to see if this code would recoginize \n or \r within the text file before I even attempt to write the actual code for paragraph count. The output is always Paragraph count: 0. This is very wrong, as there is at least 30-40 lines within my text document so I'm doing something wrong.

Does anyone have any idea about how to write this? What it comes down to is I'm not sure about how to: search a line ("fed" into a string?) for a property and then, if said property is met, searchs the next line (string) for another property and if that one is met, increment the paragraph count.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

The problem is that nextLine() eliminates the \n's. An empty line will be read as an empty String, check for that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PhHein

The problem is that nextLine() eliminates the \n's. An empty line will be read as an empty String, check for that.

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Thanks! I should have read the information on scanner.nextLine() better. The problem I have now is I'm not sure how to check the next line for content/words. I have tried a nested if statement like:

Code:

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    while (paraScan.hasNextLine()){
        line2 = paraScan.nextLine();
        if (line2.contains("") || line2.contains(null)){
        paraScan.nextLine(); // ???
            if(line2 != ""){
                paraCount++;
            }
          }
        }

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but I'm getting an error on run: "java.util.NoSuchElementException: No line found." Obviously the problem is with the 2nd paraScan.nextLine(). How do I advance the scanner to the next line and check for content? Thanks again.

Ow, you're supposed to compare Strings using equals() and the second paraScan.nextLine(); will fail if you have reached the last line. I'd remember the last line and if the last line is not empty, but the current line is empty you have found a paragraph boundary. But keep in mind that there could be an empty line at the end of the file.

EDIT: and check whether the methods you invoke do what you think they do:

Code:

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System.out.println("Hello Vox".contains(""));

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