Hi,
Welcome to JavaRanch!
If you use the CODE tags, instead of the QUOTE tags, the formatting in your block of text will be preserved; I fixed this post for you as an example.
Good job on your first program! If you're interested in ways to make it better, here are my thoughts: note how every single branch of the "if" statement does the same thing. It's always bad to have duplicated code, for two reasons: one, it's easy to make a mistake in one of the copies, but hard to find it; and second, it's hard to change many copies of the same code -- harder then it would be to change just one copy would be, anyway.
So how do we have only one copy? Somehow, you'd want to have a
lookup table which told the program the equivalent for each character. Then you could just do one lookup, and one catenation, for each character. There are a number of ways you might do this, some easier to describe, some more efficient, some easier to understand... The java.util.HashMap class would figure prominently in several of these ways. Rather than tell you what to do, exactly, I'll let you have a look at the
documentation for that class and see what you can come up with on your own. Come on back and show us in this
thread -- or ask a question here if you get stuck!