What does the exercise wants from me

Question

I don't understand what exactly this exercise wants. I used "\s+" as regex. also used the negation of it.

com/example/BlogPost.java

package com.example;

import java.util.Date;

public class BlogPost {
  private String mAuthor;
  private String mTitle;
  private String mBody;
  private String mCategory;
  private Date mCreationDate;

  public BlogPost(String author, String title, String body, String category, Date creationDate) {
    mAuthor = author;
    mTitle = title;
    mBody = body;
    mCategory = category;
    mCreationDate = creationDate;
  }

  public String getAuthor() {
    return mAuthor;
  }

  public String getTitle() {
    return mTitle;
  }

  public String getBody() {
    return mBody;
  }

  public String getCategory() {
    return mCategory;
  }

  public Date getCreationDate() {
    return mCreationDate;
  }

  public String getWords() {
    return mBody.split("[\s+ \]");
  }
}

Answer 1 · 2017-03-03T10:44:25Z

March 3, 2017 10:44am

You're pretty close with your definition of getWords()

public String getWords() {
    return mBody.split("[\s+ \]");
}

but there are a few things that need to change. First, and most importantly, since you are returning "words" you'll aren't returning just a String but a String[] array filled with all of the words created with the split method. If you change

public String getWords()

to

public String[] getWords()

you'll be halfway there.

The final issues rest with your regex

    return mBody.split("[\s+ \]");

The \ preceding the s needs to be escaped properly, so you'll wind up with \\s+ instead. Also, you'll need to remove the escape character in front of the closing bracket, ending with

public String getWords() {
    return mBody.split("[\\s+]");
}

Now, if we changed that and run it, you'll see a different result from the challenge. It expected 11 words but it received 12. We're close. Progress! Yay us!

To put the cherry on top and finish the challenge, we need to understand that the brackets aren't exactly necessary in this case. Since we are only defining one character class \s and it doesn't need to be separated, we could remove them for simplicity's sake. However, I like your style, so we will leave them for this exercise. The + tells us that we are to remove 1 or more whitespace characters. Without it, we would only find the first one, then jump out.

The problem here is that we are using the brackets, which causes the + to be matched literally as a part of the character class. If we move it outside the bracket, like so

public String[] getWords() {
    return mBody.split("[\\s]+");
}

and we run the program, it will now match like we want. Challenge complete! Now...time for some real Java (coffee), haha. Good luck!

Answer 2 · 2017-03-03T13:24:43Z

March 3, 2017 1:24pm

I understand, thanks!

Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Looking to learn something new?

Oraseanu Daniel

Oraseanu Daniel

What does the exercise wants from me

2 Answers

Mike Wagner

Mike Wagner

Oraseanu Daniel

Oraseanu Daniel

Mike Wagner

Mike Wagner

Oraseanu Daniel

Oraseanu Daniel