Java- How to Find a vowel

[Beeeyeee]

I'm writing a program that will take a word the user inputs, then translate it to pig latin 

(in case you dont know:  For words that begin with consonants, the initial consonant or consonant cluster is moved to the end of the word, and "ay" is added, as in the following examples  "happy" → "appyhay"  "glove" → "oveglay"  "school" → "oolschay" For words that begin with vowels, "way" is added at the end of the word. Examples are  "egg" → "eggway"  "inbox" → "inboxway"  "eight" → "eightway")

 

anyway i'm having trouble figuring out how to tell if the first letter is a vowell or consonant. how do you do that?

import java.util.Scanner;

public class Operation4
{
   public static void main (String[] args)
   {
      Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
      
      String word = "";
      String firstLetter = "";
      String pigLatin = "";
      
      //get word from user
      System.out.println("Hello! Enter any word and we'll professionally translate it for you:");
      word = in.nextLine();
      
      //trim off any white space and puncuation
      word = word.trim(); 
      word = word.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z\\s]", "");
      
      firstLetter = word.charAt(0); //firstLetter = first letter of 'word'
      
      //detect if first letter is a vowell or consonant
      if (firstLetter.equalsIgnoreCase = ) //if firstLetter = a vowell
      {
         pigLatin = (word + "way");
      }
      else
      {
         //***move vowell to end of sentence + "ay" ***
      }
      
      //***capitolize first letter, lowercase all other letters***
            
      System.out.println(pigLatin);
      
   }
}

[79wjd]

if(firstLetter.toLowerCase() == 'a' || firstLetter.toLowerCase() == 'e' || ......){

      //stuff

}

[Beeeyeee]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

 

if(firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'a' || firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'e' || ......){

      //stuff

}

 

Thank you sir! hope this works. 

[dany_boy]

Unless the String class has a built in function to distinguish between consonants and vowels, you'll need to create your own method.

[Beeeyeee]

Okay that part worked I think, but i'm having trouble with Strings & chars. 

 

if I make firstLetter a String, I get 3 errors: "incompatible types", and two "cannot find symbol"'s

but if I make firstLetter a char, I get 2 errors: "a char cannot be derefrenced" and another "cannot find symbol"

the "cannot find symbol"s should go away once this is worked out.

 

but I guess i'm having difficulty converting a char to a string or vice versa and I don't quite understand what i'm doing wrong. I've been researching to no avail. 

import java.util.Scanner;

public class Operation4
{
   public static void main (String[] args)
   {
      Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
      
      String word = "";
      char firstLetter = ' '; 
      //String firstLetter = "";
      String pigLatin = "";
      
      //get word from user
      System.out.println("Hello! Enter any word and we'll professionally translate it for you:");
      word = in.nextLine();
      
      //trim off any white space and puncuation
      word = word.trim(); 
      word = word.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z\\s]", "");
      
      //firstLetter = first letter of 'word'
      firstLetter = word.charAt(0);  
           
      //detect if first letter is a vowell or consonant
      if (firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'a') // || firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'e'  || firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'i'  || firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'o'  || firstLetter.toLowerCase == 'u'
      {
         pigLatin = (word + "way");
      }
      else
      {
        pigLatin = (word + firstLetter + "ay"); //***move vowell to end of sentence + "ay" ***
      }
      
      //***capitolize first letter, lowercase all other letters***     
      pigLatin.toLowerCase = pigLatin.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase() + pigLatin.substring(1);
     
            
      System.out.println(pigLatin);
      
   }
}

[79wjd]

1 hour ago, Beeeyeee said:

Okay that part worked I think, but i'm having trouble with Strings & chars. 

 

if I make firstLetter a String, I get 3 errors: "incompatible types", and two "cannot find symbol"'s

but if I make firstLetter a char, I get 2 errors: "a char cannot be derefrenced" and another "cannot find symbol"

the "cannot find symbol"s should go away once this is worked out.

 

but I guess i'm having difficulty converting a char to a string or vice versa and I don't quite understand what i'm doing wrong. I've been researching to no avail. 

 

 

toLowerCase() is a string function, not a char function, I wasn't paying attention. 

 

Do: 

String lowerCase = word.toLowerCase();

char firstLetter = lowerCase.charAt(0);


//or if you don't need to preserve the original capitalizations, just:
word.toLowerCase(); 
char firstLetter = word.charAt(0);

[straight_stewie]

2 hours ago, Beeeyeee said:

I'm writing a program that will take a word the user inputs, then translate it to pig latin 

This is a perfect situation to use Regex.

The following example returns the first vowel in a word. A more complex pattern could return all the vowels in a word. Regex is difficult to me, and I couldn't come up with the exact pattern for your uses. Sorry. An alternative to a more complex Regex would be to use a simple regex to determine if a character is a vowel, and then iterate through all the characters in a string. If you did that though, you might as well check the character against a dictionary that holds all the vowels.

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[aeiouy]", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
Matcher m = p.matcher("Your_string_here");

if (m.find()) {
  // found a vowel
}

else {
  // Didn't find a vowel.
  
	

 

[P4ZD4]

this should also work

 

string vowelCharacters = "aeiouAEIOU";

if(vowelCharacters.contains(firstLetter)){
...
}

 

[Nineshadow]

11 hours ago, straight_stewie said:

This is a perfect situation to use Regex.

The following example returns the first vowel in a word. A more complex pattern could return all the vowels in a word. Regex is difficult to me, and I couldn't come up with the exact pattern for your uses. Sorry. An alternative to a more complex Regex would be to use a simple regex to determine if a character is a vowel, and then iterate through all the characters in a string. If you did that though, you might as well check the character against a dictionary that holds all the vowels.

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[aeiouy]", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
Matcher m = p.matcher("Your_string_here");

if (m.find()) {
  // found a vowel
}

else {
  // Didn't find a vowel.
  
	

 

I seriously doubt the OP knows or should know regex right now.

Keeping it simple and dumb is just fine.

And for that, I could think of 2 options:

public static boolean isVowel(char c) {
  return "AEIOUaeiou".indexOf(c) != -1;
}

or

public static boolean isVowel(char c) {
  return c=='a' || c=='e' || c=='i' || c=='o' || c=='u' || c=='A' || c=='E' || c=='I' || c=='O' || c=='U';
}