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    Lesson - 1 - Characters

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    Kavya Pandya
    This document discusses representing and manipulating characters in Java. It notes that characters are represented by single quotes, while strings use double quotes. Characters can be represented by their ASCII values. The Character class provides methods for checking character properties like uppercase, lowercase, digit, etc. It also allows converting between char and Character objects. The document gives an example of a program that takes user input, converts it to a character, and checks each character in a string to classify it as uppercase, lowercase, or a number using Character class methods.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Lesson - 1 - Characters

    Uploaded by

    Kavya Pandya
    45 views5 pages
    This document discusses representing and manipulating characters in Java. It notes that characters are represented by single quotes, while strings use double quotes. Characters can be represented by their ASCII values. The Character class provides methods for checking character properties like uppercase, lowercase, digit, etc. It also allows converting between char and Character objects. The document gives an example of a program that takes user input, converts it to a character, and checks each character in a string to classify it as uppercase, lowercase, or a number using Character class methods.

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    Lesson_1 - Characters

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    This document discusses representing and manipulating characters in Java. It notes that characters are represented by single quotes, while strings use double quotes. Characters can be represented by their ASCII values. The Character class provides methods for checking character properties like uppercase, lowercase, digit, etc. It also allows converting between char and Character objects. The document gives an example of a program that takes user input, converts it to a character, and checks each character in a string to classify it as uppercase, lowercase, or a number using Character class methods.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    45 views5 pages

    Lesson - 1 - Characters

    Uploaded by

    Kavya Pandya
    This document discusses representing and manipulating characters in Java. It notes that characters are represented by single quotes, while strings use double quotes. Characters can be represented by their ASCII values. The Character class provides methods for checking character properties like uppercase, lowercase, digit, etc. It also allows converting between char and Character objects. The document gives an example of a program that takes user input, converts it to a character, and checks each character in a string to classify it as uppercase, lowercase, or a number using Character class methods.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 5

    DATATYPES AND CONTROL STRUCTURES:

    Using Characters in Java

    A character in Java is represented by a single digit in a string. A string is identified by the use of double
    quotes whereas a character is identified by single quotes. The cool thing about characters is that we can
    represent them as numbers. The value of each character can be found from the ASCII table.
    (http://www.asciitable.com).

    If you look at the ASCII table, the letters:


    • A – Z have the decimal values 65 – 90
    • a – z have the decimal values 97 – 122

    Java allows us to convert these numbers to characters.

    You may have noticed that with Scanner, there is no nextChar() method. To read in a
    character, we are forced to read in a string and then check for the first position of the string.
    If we wanted to check character by character, we would need to read in a string, and then
    set up a loop to step through each character in the string. We will let the note on Strings deal
    with this. For now, note that we can convert between characters and numbers.

    In the following program, we will ask the user for a number and then convert it a letter.

    public class ConvertChar {

    public static void main (String[] args)


    {
    Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);

    int num;

    System.out.print(“Enter a number (65 – 90) OR (97 – 122): \t” );


    num = scan.nextInt();

    System.out.print(“\n\nYour value of ” + num + “ is the letter \””


    + (char)num + “\””);
    }
    }

    The output would look like:

    Enter a number (65 – 90) OR (97 – 122): 67

    Your value of 68 is the letter C

    Using Characters in Java Page 1 of 5


    You will notice in the above program, we simply cast the number to a char. We could have also made a
    variable to store the character by modifying the above program:

    public class ConvertChar {

    public static void main (String[] args)


    {
    Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);

    int num;
    char letter;

    System.out.print(“Enter a number (65 – 90) OR (97 – 122): \t” );


    num = scan.nextInt();

    letter = (char)num;

    System.out.print(“\n\nYour value of ” + num + “ is the letter \””


    + letter + “\””);
    }
    }

    You can even use letter++; to increase the value of the character to the next one that appears in
    the ASCII table. However, we need to be a little bit careful:

    char letter = ‘a’;


    letter++; ‘a’ ‘b’
    This is not the same as:

    char letter = ‘a’;


    letter = letter + 1;

    The reason why the first scenario works and not the second is because the first scenario, Java
    understands to that the letter is a number and we want to move one letter down in the alphabet. In the
    second scenario, even though letter++ is the same as letter = letter + 1, Java see this as an equation
    rather than a transformation, and this cannot distinguish that we want to change the decimal value of the
    variable letter. Java sees this as a calculation and determines a type mismatch, trying to add an integer
    to the character in the variable letter.

    THE CHARACTER CLASS:


    The Character class offers a number of useful methods for manipulating
    characters that are not available in the String class. For example, you can
    use the Character class to determine if a character is uppercase, lowercase, a
    number, etc.). Although we can do this in the String class, it might be easier
    to implement this in the Character class.

    Using Characters in Java Page 2 of 5


    You can create a Character object from a char value. For example, the following statement creates a
    Character object for the character ‘x’:

    Character myChar = new Character(‘x’);

    The following are some of the methods included in the Character class that allow you to do various
    things with characters:

    METHOD DESCRIPTION EXAMPLE

    charValue (): char Returns the char value. myChar.charValue();

    compareTo(Character Compares this character with another character. myChar.compareTo(new


    anotherChar): int Returns the value 0 if the two characters are Character(‘a’));
    equal, or a value less than 0 if they are not
    equal.

    equals(Character anotherChar): Compares this character with another character. myChar.equals(new


    boolean Returns true if the two characters being Character(‘a’));
    compared are equals; otherwise returns false.

    Character.isWhiteSpace(char c): Determines if the specified character is white Character.isWhiteSpace(‘x’);


    boolean space.

    Character.isDigit(char c): boolean Determines if the specified character is a digit. Character.isDigit(‘x’);


    Returns true if it is a digit; otherwise returns
    false.
    Character.isLetter(char c): boolean Determines if the specified character is a letter. Character.isLetter(‘x’);
    Returns true if it is a letter; otherwise returns
    false.
    Character.isLetterOrDigit(char c): Determines if the specified character is a letter Character.isLetterOrDigit(‘x’);
    boolean or a digit. Returns true if it is a letter or a digit;
    otherwise returns false.

    Character.isLowerCase(char c): Determines if the specified character is Character.isLowerCase(‘x’);


    boolean lowercase. Returns true if it is lowercase;
    otherwise returns false.
    Character.isUpperCase(char c): Determines if the specified character is Character.isUpperCase(‘x’);
    boolean uppercase. Returns true if it is uppercase;
    otherwise returns false.

    Character.toLowerCase(char c): Converts the character to lowercase. Character.toLowerCase(‘x’);


    char
    Character.toUpperCase(char c): Converts the character to uppercase. Character.toUpperCase(‘x’);
    char

    toString(): String Converts a Character object to a String object. myChar.toString();

    You can find the rest of the Character class methods by referring to the Java API documentation.

    We will not focus too much on the Character Class in the course, but there might be times when you
    want to utilize the methods from here in a program.

    CHARACTER + STRING CLASS SAMPLE PROGRAM


    The following program will demonstrate how to combine the Character class methods with the String
    class methods to determine if the characters in the string the user enters are upper case characters,
    lower case characters, or a number.

    Using Characters in Java Page 3 of 5


    import java.util.Scanner;

    public class PostalCode {

    public static void main(String[] args)


    {
    Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);

    String code;

    System.out.print("Type a postal code: ");


    code = scan.nextLine();

    System.out.println();

    for (int i = 0; i < code.length(); i++)


    {
    if (Character.isUpperCase(code.charAt(i)))
    {
    System.out.println("UPPERCASE");
    }
    else if (Character.isLowerCase(code.charAt(i)))
    {
    System.out.println("LOWERCASE");

    }
    else
    {
    System.out.println("NUMBER");
    }
    }
    }
    }

    The output will look like:

    Notice that in this output, the postal code is only 6 digits, yet we got 7 output messages. This is because
    in using the character class, Java counted the space as a digit. We could extend this code to check for
    whitespace by implementing the isWhitespace() method from the Character class. In our example, we
    will just add a space in the output:

    Using Characters in Java Page 4 of 5


    import java.util.Scanner;

    public class PostalCode {

    public static void main(String[] args) {


    Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);

    String code;

    System.out.print("Type a postal code: ");


    code = scan.nextLine();

    System.out.println();

    for (int i = 0; i < code.length(); i++)


    {
    if (Character.isUpperCase(code.charAt(i)))
    {
    System.out.println("UPPERCASE");
    }
    else if (Character.isLowerCase(code.charAt(i)))
    {
    System.out.println("LOWERCASE");
    }
    else if (Character.isWhitespace(code.charAt(i)))
    {
    System.out.println();
    }
    else
    {
    System.out.println("NUMBER");
    }
    }
    }
    }

    The output now looks like:

    Using Characters in Java Page 5 of 5

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