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SRM7 Jul 2004
SRM 202

Hyphenated

Problem statement, definition, constraints, and public examples.

Problem Statement

We want to be able to judge whether text is suitable for a particular age group. We will base our judgment on the average length of a word in the text, so we need to define what a "word" is.

We define a "word" to be a maximal sequence of letters ('A'-'Z' and/or 'a-z') within a single line. (Maximal means that if 2 letters are adjacent within a line, they are in the same word.) But if a line ends with a sequence of one or more letters immediately followed by a hyphen ('-') and the next line starts with a sequence of one or more letters, all these letters are considered to be in the same word. It is even possible that a hyphenated word could extend across several lines (see Example 2).

Create a class Hyphenated that contains a method avgLength that is given a String[] lines containing the lines of text and that returns the average length of the words within the text.

Definition

Class:
Hyphenated
Method:
avgLength
Parameters:
String[]
Returns:
double
Method signature:
double avgLength(String[] lines)
(be sure your method is public)

Notes

  • A return value with either an absolute or relative error of less than 1.0E-9 is considered correct.

Constraints

  • lines will contain between 1 and 50 elements inclusive.
  • Each element of lines will contain between 1 and 50 characters inclusive.
  • Each character in each element of lines will be a letter ('A-'Z' or 'a'-'z') or will be one of these: ' ', '-', '.'
  • At least one element of lines will contain a letter.

Examples

  1. {"  now is the ex-", "ample.  "} 
    Returns: 3.75
    There are 4 words: now, is, the, example 
  2. {"  now is the ex-", " ample.  "}
    Returns: 3.0
    There are 5 words: now, is, the, ex, ample Note that the leading blank prevents the joining of ex and ample. Also note that words only consist of letters, so the hyphen is never a part of a word. 
  3. {"inter-","national-","ization.."}
    Returns: 20.0
    There is only one word.
  4. {"All the time I have well-defined  "," trouble."}
    Returns: 4.125
    Note that well-defined consists of 2 separate words.
  5. {"hello-","-","-","-","great"}
    Returns: 5.0

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