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1. Dive in A Quick Dip: Breaking the Surface > Phrase-O-Matic
Phrase-O-Matic
In a nutshell, the program makes three lists of words, then randomly picks one word from each of the three lists, and prints out the result. Don’t worry if you don’t understand exactly what’s happening in each line. For gosh sakes, you’ve got the whole book ahead of you, so relax. This is just a quick look from a 30,000 foot outside-the-box targeted leveraged paradigm.
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The first step is to create three String arrays – the containers that will hold all the words. Declaring and creating an array is easy; here’s a small one:
String[] pets = {"Fido", "Zeus", "Bin"};Each word is in quotes (as all good Strings must be) and separated by commas.
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For each of the three lists (arrays), the goal is to pick a random word, so we have to know how many words are in each list. If there are 14 words in a list, then we need a random number between 0 and 13 (Java arrays are zero-based, so the first word is at position 0, the second word position 1, and the last word is position 13 in a 14-element array). Quite handily, a Java array is more than happy to tell you its length. You just have to ask. In the pets array, we’d say:
