[Bluej-discuss] asking for help

[Poul Henriksen]

Hi John,

I think this exercise has been invalidated by modifications to the Java 
API documentation. In the documentation for JDK 1.3 it specifically 
mentioned control characters in the String.trim() javadoc:

"This method may be used to trim whitespace from the beginning and end 
of a string; in fact, it trims all ASCII control characters as well."

The documentation for the more current versions of the JDK means the 
same thing - it is just explained in a more confusing way. Codes \u0020 
and below are in fact control characters. So, just replace every 
occurrence of "have codes greater than '\u0020'" with "are not control 
characters" and it might make a bit more sense.

I agree that the exercise is not very good anymore, since it is unlikely 
that the students can make any sense of the current documentation for 
the trim method.

Poul Henriksen

John Simonds wrote:
> Exercise 5.7 asks the student to find the trim method in the Java Class libraries documentation (this I did).  Then it asks what "the documentation says about control charachters at the beginnig of a string."  
> I could not make heads or tails of what it said, since it went on about "Unicode charachters," 
> (which it does not elaborate as to what that means) and some obscure formula which does nothing to explain what to do with control charachters, and what are control charachters?
> I don't see this exercise as being very well defined.  Could anyone clear this up?
>  
>  
>  
> John Simonds
> Systems Technologist
> simonj2 at sage.edu
> (518)244-3111
> (518)292-1734
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