Lab: File Data and Collections

Goals for this lab:

• Read a text file.

• Work with loops.

• Work with a Dictionary and a List.

• Retrieve a random entry.

Overview

Copy project dict_lab_stub to your own project. Note that there are data files in the project directory. Make sure your project, like this stub, sets the Output Path to the project folder.

This lab provides a replacement file fake_help.cs for an improved project. The project still needs some additions in a helper class.

Before we get there, open the comparison program fake_help_verbose/fake_help_verbose.cs and look at the methods GetParagraphs() and GetDictionary(). All the strings for the responses are pre-coded for you there, but if you were writing your own methods, it would be a pain. There is all the repetitious code to make multiline strings and then to add to the List and Dictionary. This lab will provide simple versatile methods to fill a List<string> or a Dictionary<string, string>: You only need you to write the string data itself into a text file, with the only overhead being a few extra newlines. Minor further adaptations could save time later in a project, too.

Look in your copy of fake_help.cs. It creates the List guessList and the Dictionary responses using more general functions that you need to fill in. The stubs for these new versions are put in the class FileUtil for easy reuse. Main calls these functions and chooses the files to read. The results will look the same as the original program to the user, but the second version will be easier for a programmer to read and generalize: It will be easier in other situations where you want lots of canned data in your program (like in a game you might write soon).

The stub should run as is (mostly saying things are not implemented). Test out your work at every stage!

You will need to complete very short versions of functions GetParagraphs and GetDictionary that have been moved to file_util.cs and now take a StreamReader as parameter. The files that they read will contain the basic data. You can look in the lab project at the first data file: help_not_defaults.txt, and the beginning is shown below:

Welcome to We-Give-Answers!
What do you have to say?

We-Give-Answers 
thanks you for your patronage.
Call again if we can help you 
with any other problem!

No other customer has ever complained 
about this before.  What is your system 
configuration?

That sounds odd. Could you describe 
that problem in more detail?

You can see that it includes the data for the welcome and goodbye strings followed by all the data to go in the List of random answers.

One complication is that many of these strings take up several lines, in what we call a paragraph. We follow a standard convention for putting paragraphs into plain text: Put a blank line after a paragraph to mark its end. As you can see, that is how help_not_defaults.txt is set up.

Steps

All of the additions you need to make are in bodies of function definitions in the class FileUtil. Look back to Main in FakeAdvise to see how the functions from FileUtil are actually used: The StreamReader is set up to read from the right file. The the FileUtil functions ReadParagraph, GetParagraphs, and GetDictionary are used to provide the text data needed.

ReadParagraph

The first method to complete in file_util.cs is useful by itself and later for use in the GetParagraphs and GetDictionary that you will complete. See the stub:

/// Return a string consisting of a sequence of nonempty lines read
/// from reader. All the newlines at the ends of these lines are included.
/// The function ends after reading (but not including) an empty line.
public static string ReadParagraph(StreamReader reader)

The first call to ReadParagraph, using the file illustrated above, should return the following (showing the escape codes for the newlines):

"Welcome to We-Give-Answers!\nWhat do you have to say?\n"

and then the reader should be set to read the goodbye paragraph (the next time ReadParagraph is called).

To code, you can read lines one at a time, and append them to the part of the paragraph read so far. There is one thing to watch out for: The ReadLine function throws away the following newline ("\n") in the input. You need to preserve it, so be sure to explicitly add a newline, back onto your paragraph string after each nonempty line is added. The returned paragraph should end with a single newline.

Throw away the empty line in the input after the paragraph. Make sure you stop after reading the empty line. It is very important that you advance the reader to the right place, to be ready to read the next paragraph.

Be careful of a pitfall with files: You can only read a given chunk once: If you read again, with the exact same syntax, you get the next line of the file. The ReadLine method has the side effect of advancing the reading position in the file.

Testing: This first short ReadParagraph function should actually be most of the code that you write for the lab! The program is set up so you can immediately run the program and test ReadParagraph: It is called to read in the welcome string and the goodbye string for the program, so if those come correctly to the screen, you can advance to the next two parts.

GetParagraphs

Since you have ReadParagraph at your disposal, you now only need to insert a few remaining lines of code to complete the next method GetParagraphs, that reads to the end of the file, and likely processes more than one paragraph.

      /// Read the remaining empty-line terminated paragraphs
      /// from reader into a new list of paragraph strings,
      /// and return the list.
      /// The function reads all the way to the end of
      /// the file attached to reader.
      /// The file must end with two newlines in sequence: one at the
      /// end of the last nonempty line followed by one for the empty line.
      public static List<string> GetParagraphs(StreamReader reader)
      {
         List<string> all = new List<string>();

         // REPLACE the next line with your lines of code to fill all
         all.Add("You have not coded GetParagraphs yet!\n");

         return all;
      }

Look again at help_not_defaults.txt, to see how the data is set up.

This lab requires very few lines of code. Be sure to read the examples and instructions carefully (several times). A lot of ideas get packed into the few lines!

Testing: After writing GetParagraphs, the random responses in the lab project program should work as the user enters lines in the program.

GetDictionary

The last stub to complete in file_util.cs is GetDictionary. Its stub also takes a StreamReader as parameter. In Main this function is called to read from help_not_responses.txt. Here are the first few lines:

crash
Well, it never crashes on our system. 
It must have something to do with your system. 
Tell me more about your configuration.

slow
I think this has to do with your hardware. 
Upgrading your processor should solve all 
performance problems. 
Have you got a problem with our software?

performance
Performance was quite adequate in all our tests. 
Are you running any other processes in the background?

Here is the stub of the function to complete, reading such data:

/// Return a new Dictionary, taking data for it from reader.
/// Reader contains key-value pairs, where each single-line key is
/// followed by a possibly multi-line paragraph value that is terminated
/// by an empty line. The file must end with two newlines in sequence:
/// one at the end of the last nonempty line followed by one for the
/// empty line.
public static Dictionary<string, string> GetDictionary(StreamReader reader)
{
   Dictionary<string, string> d = new Dictionary<string, string>();

   // add your lines of code to fill d here!

   return d;
}

Testing: When you complete this function, the program should behave just like the earlier verbose version with the hard-coded data, using a dictionary value if it finds the right key, or choosing a random response if there is no key match.

Be careful to distinguish the data file help_not_responses.txt from help_not_responses2.txt, used in the extra credit option.

This should also be an extremely short amount of coding! Think of following through the data file, and get the corresponding sequence of instructions to handle the data in the exact same sequence.

Show the program output to a TA (after the extra credit if you like).

Extra credit

1. (20%) Modify ReadParagragh so it also works if the paragraph ends at the end of the file, with no blank line after it, or if the line after the paragraph only has whitespace characters. Both changes are good to bullet-proof the code, since the added or removed whitespace is hard to see in print.

2. (20%) The crude word classification scheme would recognize “crash”, but not “crashed” or “crashes”. You could make whole file entries for each key variation, repeating the value paragraph. A concise approach is to use a data file like help_not_responses2.txt. Here are the first few lines:

   crash crashes crashed
   Well, it never crashes on our system. 
   It must have something to do with your system. 
   Tell me more about your configuration.
   
   slow slowly
   I think this has to do with your hardware. 
   Upgrading your processor should solve all 
   performance problems. 
   Have you got a problem with our software?
   
   performance
   Performance was quite adequate in all our tests. 
   Are you running any other processes in the background?
   
   

   The line that used to have one key now may have several blank-separated keys.

   Here is how the documentation for GetDictionary should be changed:

   /// Return a new Dictionary, taking data for it from reader.
   /// Reader generates key-value pairs, where one or more space
   /// separated keys on a line are followed by a possibly multi-line
   /// paragraph value that is terminated by an empty line.  Each
   /// key on the line is mapped to the same paragraph that follows.
   /// The file must end with two newlines in sequence:  one at the end
   /// of the last nonempty line followed by one for the empty line.
   

   Modify the lab project to use this file effectively: Find “help_not_responses.txt” on line 22 in Main. Change it to “help_not_responses2.txt” (inserting ‘2’), so Main reads it.

   In your test of the program, be sure to use several of the keys that apply to the same response, and show to your TA.