letter to number conversion

[Jade Davidson]

I hope someone can help me. I am doing a program that involves converting the letters in someone's name to numbers. Our teacher gave us a conversion grid, and I worked out a formula for converting the letters using modular arithmetic (see below).
What I want to do is to go through the name, converting each letter to a number, according to the formula shown. I thought that a String array would be the best way to do this, but I keep getting errors. The source code is below:

<font size=2.5>
import java.util.*;
import java.lang.*;
public class Name {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
     String [] nameArray  = {"Brian Candido"};
     for (int i = 0; i < nameArray.length; i++)
     {
        nameArray[i] = (('a' - 'a') % 9) + 1;
        System.out.print(nameArray[i]);
     }  
  }
}

(edited by Cindy to format code)

[This message has been edited by Cindy Glass (edited November 15, 2001).]

[Junilu Lacar]

Jade,
A few hints:
- nameArray.length == 1, not 13
- the expression (('a' - 'a') % 9) + 1 results in an int value of 1. This is evaluated at compile time and will never change inside the for-loop. You cannot assign the value 1 to a String variable.
Good luck!
Junilu

[Cindy Glass]

You could convert the String to a char Array using the toCharArray() method of String, and THEN walk through the chars doing the conversion etc.
String name = "Brian Candido"; //or better yet = args[0];
char[] myNameArray = name.toCharArray();