Counting chars read each minute, infinite loop

[KAS]

Hi again,

I have a problem which I do not know how to solve.

Making a user-friendly program that counts how many letters(a-z or A-Z) the user types each minute, prints it on the screen, starts over in an infinite counting loop. As it is supposed to be user friendly I would want an easy way to quit the program?

Suggestions most appreciated :)

[ozzyman]

use getTimeInMillis() before the user starts typing, get another instance of getTimeInMillis() once the user stops typing, subtract the former from the latter, divide total character count (i.e. how many letters were typed during that period) by your previous answer; that should give you your final answer of characters typed per millisecond, so multiply by 60000 to get characters typed per minute.

[KAS]

The program is supposed to announce every 60 seconds how many chars were read from terminal in the past 60 seconds, and so it will continue in an infinite loop. Program will continue until it is stopped

[Junky]

Maybe you need to use threads and a Timer.

[KAS]

I haven't learned about that yet, it is suggested to use for loop. But I'm nearly blank on how to put this up

[Solarsonic]

I suppose if you were advised to only use a for loop, you could use Thread.sleep() and count up time like that, but that wouldn't be accurate since computing takes time as well.

[sunde887]

Perhaps you could have a clause in the loop that is something like

if(currentTime - startTime == (divisor of a minute)){
  Print the amount of characters typed
}

[KAS]

But what is the easiest way to get it to start reading at a certain point? ie. ask user to start the process by pressing enter, and what would be the easiest way to specify which characters are legal here?

[Solarsonic]

But what is the easiest way to get it to start reading at a certain point? ie. ask user to start the process by pressing enter, and what would be the easiest way to specify which characters are legal here?

1.

Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
String line;
int charactersTyped;

for(; ;){ //infinite loop until user enters start
line=in.nextLine();
if(line.equals("start")){
for(; !line.equals("stop");){ // infinite loop until user enters stop
charactersTyped += line.length()-1; // subtract by one because if a line has 7 letters it has 8 indexes, and line.length() returns the indexes
line=in.nextLine();
}
}
}

2. You would have to use if statements like

if(line.contains("b"))
System.out.print("Invalid character.");

If you really want to be specific and only store the legal characters from a line then it would be more involved than that

[KAS]

This is what I've made so far, as you can see it lacks most things

import java.util.Calendar;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        int input = 0;
        long time = 0;
        

        int tall = System.in.available();
        for (int i = 0; i < tall; i++) {
            do {
                input = System.in.read();
                time = System.currentTimeMillis();
            } while ((input > 64 && input < 91) || (input > 96 && input < 123));

            System.out.println(i);

        }
    }
}

[ozzyman]

if you make the method like i originally posted, you can simply ask it for the figure after every minute

    try {
         while (true) {
             //calculations;
             Thread.sleep(60*1000);
         }
     } catch (InterruptedException e) {
         e.printStackTrace();
     }