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Tutorial 9

The document provides instructions for three programming exercises. The first asks the student to modify a program to catch exceptions from non-letter characters. The second asks them to modify a program to continue parsing after exceptions by moving exception handling code. The third asks them to modify a factorial method to throw exceptions for invalid input values.

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10 views

Tutorial 9

The document provides instructions for three programming exercises. The first asks the student to modify a program to catch exceptions from non-letter characters. The second asks them to modify a program to continue parsing after exceptions by moving exception handling code. The third asks them to modify a factorial method to throw exceptions for invalid input values.

Uploaded by

pilot250504
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Programming 2

Tutorial 9
Exercise 1 (required)

File CountLetters.java contains a program that reads a word from the user and prints the
number of occurrences of each letter in the word. Save it to your package and study it, then
compile and run it to see how it works. While reading the code, note that the word is converted
to all upper case first, then each letter is translated to a number in the range 0..25 (by
subtracting 'A') for use as an index. No test is done to ensure that the characters are in fact
letters.

Step 1. Run CountLetters and enter a phrase, that is, more than one word with spaces or other
punctuation in between. It should throw an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, because a
non-letter character will generate an index that is not between 0 and 25. It might be desirable
to allow non-letter characters, but not count them. Of course, you could explicitly test the value
of the character to see if it is between 'A' and 'Z'. However, an alternative is to go ahead and
use the translated character as an index, and catch an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if
it occurs. Since you don’t want to do anything when a non-letter occurs, the handler will be
empty. Modify this method to do this as follows:

 Put the body of the first for loop in a try.


 Add a catch block that catches the exception, but don’t do anything with it.
 Compile and run your program.

Step 2. Now modify the body of the catch block so that it prints a useful message (e.g., “Not
a letter”) followed by the exception. Compile and run the program. Although it’s useful to
print the exception for debugging, when you’re trying to smoothly handle a condition that you
don’t consider erroneous, you often don’t want to. In your print statement, replace the
exception with the character that created the out-of-bounds index. Run the program again;
much nicer!

Exercise 2 (required)

File ParseInts.java contains a program that does the following:


1. Prompts for and reads in a line of input
2. Uses a second Scanner to take the input line one token at a time and parses an integer
from each token as it is extracted.
3. Sums the integers.
4. Prints the sum.
Save ParseInts to your directory and compile and run it. If you give it the input

10 20 30 40

it should print

The sum of the integers on the line is 100.

Try some other inputs as well. Now try a line that contains both integers and other values,
e.g.,

We have 2 dogs and 1 cat.

You should get a NumberFormatException when it tries to call Integer.parseInt on "We",


which is not an integer. One way around this is to put the loop that reads inside a try and
catch the NumberFormatException but not do anything with it. This way if it’s not an integer
it doesn’t cause an error; it goes to the exception handler, which does nothing. Do this as
follows:
 Modify the program to add a try statement that encompasses the entire while
loop. The try and opening { should go before the while, and the catch after
the loop body. Catch a NumberFormatException and have an empty body for
the catch.
 Compile and run the program and enter a line with mixed integers and other
values. You should find that it stops summing at the first non-integer, so the line
above will produce a sum of 0, and the line "1 fish 2 fish" will produce a
sum of 1. This is because the entire loop is inside the try, so when an exception
is thrown the loop is terminated. To make it continue, move the try and catch
inside the loop. Now when an exception is thrown, the next statement is the next
iteration of the loop, so the entire line is processed. The dogs-and-cats input
should now give a sum of 3, as should the fish input.
Exercise 3 (required)

File Factorials.java contains a program utilizing the factorial method from the
MathUtils class to compute factorials of user-input integers. Save the files to your package,
study the code, compile, and run Factorials to observe its functionality. Test with various
positive integers, then try a negative number. You'll find it works for small positive integers
(smaller than 17), but returns a large negative value for larger integers and 1 for negative
integers.

1. Correcting the behavior for negative integers:


Modify the factorial method header to declare that it can throw an
IllegalArgumentException.
Adjust the factorial method body to throw an IllegalArgumentException if the
argument is negative. Pass a specific message to the constructor indicating the issue.
Compile and run Factorials to observe the program throwing an exception for
negative numbers.
2. Correcting the behavior for values over 16:
Enhance the factorial method to also check for arguments over 16, signaling an
IllegalArgumentException. Provide distinct messages for both negative and large
arguments to clarify the issue.

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