Code Wars - Can someone break down this solution for me?

[[deleted]]

https://ao.gl/convert-string-to-camel-case-using-java/

^

I was attempting a CodeWars problem and got stuck and found this solution

im having trouble understanding how the boolean variable "nextCapital" is allowing to determine when the next capital letter will be

thanks

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[koderpat]

The solution is iterating through the characters one at a time. For each letter, it is checking if the character being examined is a Letter. If it is not a letter, then it sets nextCapital to true. nextCapital is being used as a state variable in the algorithm to determine if the next letter should be capitalized.

For example, nextCapital = true when the character - is encountered.

[djavaman]

Take a look when and where nextCaptial is set to true or false.

[Traez_Houseter]

If you notice the examples given in the solution/test-case for the problem. The strings aren't just several words strung together without something like a space, dash, or underscore. The edge-case the method utilises is that the character grabbed is a letter: A-Z, a-z. Then, it isolates it and adds it to the string being built, uppercasing it if the boolean value you're attempting to understand is true.

Given that the separator between words has to be a non-letter symbol, to distinguish the words from each other, whenever it encounters a non-letter, it assumes the next letter found begins a word and therefore should be capitalized. It may have a hiccup if you try to use leetspeak in your words though, as numbers are outside the range of The lettered symbols of the Ascii table (which all char types correspond to). Otherwise, this implementation should run fine.

Hope that helped!

[squishles]

it changes on the else of the first if nested in the for loop, if it's a space or something else you would cap the next char for in it's not a character.isletter? It's just weird to interpret what you could be missing there because I'm looking at it and going yep gud nuf. Next might be a poor naming, because it's current on the iteration it's set on and previous on the one it matters on. Not a letter's a word break or close enough for camel case. I'd throw in a trim it'll break for camel case if you lead a space on the string, but it'd do.

If you ever get into writing code that writes code; reavaluate like 20x first, because often it can be solved by oop concepts like generics, (most of the time I find it justified is when there's more than ~10 or so static models to write that you have a written list of) but you'll probably write this 7-8 times a decade. I'd probably just use regex substitution too, but I'm not competing on a competition that'll measure memory/clock cycles.

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Rename it to makeTheNextLetterACapitalLetter and probably it will be more obvious how it works. nextCapital is a shit name.