what am I missing?

[Jesse Crockett]

I've already tested the file scanner which takes a few seconds to scan the whole file. This is stalling, just blinking the cursor while nothing happens...

/*
file format:
 
token token2 [...]\n
...    ...     ...\n
Zymoscope (n.) ...\n
 
*/
 
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
 
public class NounProximity {
 
public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
 
Scanner scan = new Scanner(new FileReader("Websters_1913_Dictionary.txt"));
 
String token = "";
String tokenList = "";
String token2 = "";
 
while(scan.hasNextLine()) {
 
token = scan.next();
 
token = token.toLowerCase();
 
if(token.equals("zymoscope"))
break;
 
token2 = scan.next();
 
if(token2.equals("(n.)") || token2.equals("(v.t.)"))
tokenList = tokenList + token + " " + token2 + "\n";
 
scan.nextLine();//skips the definition
}
 
scan.close();
 
System.out.println("Scanning Complete.  Writing to file...");
 
//step 2 print to file "LowerCaseVTNDictionary.dat"
 
PrintWriter printFile = new PrintWriter("LowerCaseVTNDictionary.dat");
 
printFile.write("" + tokenList);
printFile.close();
 
System.out.println("LowerCaseVTNDictionary.dat created. It contains only v.t.'s and n.'s");
 
System.out.println("Everything should be OK now.");
 
}
}    

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

I'm not clear what you're asking. What do you expect the program to do that it's not doing?

[wise owen]

add some of System.out.println and to see where you stop.

[Jesse Crockett]

actually the code was fine. it just took a lot longer to run than my test code. the cursor was blinking on an empty screen for so long that i thought it wasnt running right. i made it print out each set of tokens while it's running. now it's been running fine for over a minute, but it's still in the B's. thanks :roll:

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Jesse,

1) I bet you've heard at least once that using StringBuffer (or the JDK 1.5 StringBuilder) is better than using String and the "+" operator. This program is absolutely one of those times. If you made tokenList into a StringBuffer (or StringBuilder) and used separate "append()" calls instead of each "+" operation, you'd have a noticeable speedup.

2) Another probably large performance improvement could be gotten with buffered I/O. Replace the Scanner allocation with

new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader("Websters_1913_Dictionary.txt")));

... and you should notice a large speedup.

3) Your signature is hella confusing -- I thought it was part of your question, originally, which really confused me, as I couldn't see where any of that output was supposed to come from. I'd change it if I were you!