Finished coding a validation action that parses a word followed by an array of words. For example, “ABC” would validate if “Another Bad Creation” was passed with it. This is going to be used in the ever complicated Acronym project that has been taking me forever to finish.

It’s case insensitive, you can see the usage example in the ‘main’ class.

/*
 * Created on Sep 20, 2003
 *
 */

/**
 * @author chris
 *
 */
public class ValidateThing {

	private String acronym;
	private String[] answer;

	/**
	 * @param string
	 * @param values
	 * This object is used for validating the acronym
	 * it parses 'string' and checks the first letter
	 * of 'values'.  It should return 1 if the string
	 * passes, 0 if it doesn't.
	 */
	public ValidateThing(String string, String[] values) {
		acronym = string;
		answer = values;
	}

	public boolean isValid() {

		// keep a record of mistakes
		int errorCount = 0;

		// validate length
		if (acronym.length() != answer.length) {
			errorCount++; // wrong number of answers
		}

		// validate letter content
		try {

			// process string one character at a time
			for (int i = 0; i  0) {
			return false;
		} else {
			return true;
		}
	}

	// cheap unit test
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		String acronym = new String(”java”);
		String[] values =
			new String[] { “JUst”, “another”, “vague”, “acronym” };
		ValidateThing validateThing = new ValidateThing(acronym, values);

		if (validateThing.isValid()) {
			System.out.println(”yay!”);
		} else {
			System.out.println(”boo!”);
		}
	}

}