Jackson Mac Low's Diastic Algorithm

January 22, 2006

I have been trying to implement Jackson Mac Low’s diastic readings[link] in Java for an exercise this week. I managed to work the algorithm partly, I can choose a phrase before compile and spit out the words according to it that my program reads from an input file. Couple of things are missing though;

I am only deliminating the words through spaces, I am trying to get my hands dirty regex, but they are damn nonsense.
I need to work on errorHandling to make the program don’t go into loops. When searching for long phrases and cannot find it in the text.
Maybe a runtime-user input system.
Minor problems running the code that are stated below. Texts to be read :
Handling Errors UsingExceptions from Sun Docs
Regular Expressions from Sun Docs
Java Fundamental Class Reference I/O, Input Output Operations in Java
Introduction to the java.util.regex Package ’ Beginning Regular Expressions by Andrew Watt (through NYU Library)

// *************** DIASTIC TEXT ALGORITHM ****************

// Bugs: There is this repetition of the i after 

// it finds the phrase character, could be a problem 

// if the phrase has double char like "book".

// also i doesn't goes up to the last element.

// *******************************************************

// to do: use lines according to the marks. 

// make it look more like a poem.

// *******************************************************

import java.io.*; 
import java.nio.*; 
import java.nio.channels.*; 
public class Diasticc { 

    public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException { 

        FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(args[0]); 

        FileChannel fc = fis.getChannel(); 

        ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.allocate((int)fc.size()); 

        fc.read(bb); 

        fc.close(); 

        String content = new String(bb.array()); 

        String phrase="poem"; 

        String[] word = content.split(" "); 

        int i = 0;

        for (int k=0; k < phrase.length(); k++) { 

            for ( i = i + 1; i
                if(i >= word.length-1) {

                    i = 0; 

                }

                //System.out.println(i);

                if(word[i].length() > k) {

                if(word[i].charAt(k) == phrase.charAt(k)) { 

                   // System.out.println(i + " " + word[i]); 

                   // System.out.println(k + " " + phrase.charAt(k)); 

                   System.out.println(word[i]);

                    break; 

                } 

            } 

        }

        } 

      } 

}