Printing out a string array but replace a single element each time. Java

Question

How would I go about printing out a string array multiple times and each time it replaces one of the words with a "-"? If the array had "Hello" "Hi" "Hey" then it should print

"- Hi Hey"

"Hello - Hey"

"Hello Hi -"

This is what I have so far

 public class SkipArgs
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    { 
    int capacity = 1;
    capacity += args.length;
    String[] str = new String[capacity];

    for(int i=0; i<args.length; i++)
    {
        for (int j=0; j<args.length; j++)
        {str[j] = args[j];
        printExceptOne(str[j], i);
        }   


}
}

public static void printExceptOne(String str, int j)
{

   System.out.print(str+" ");
}
}

I don't know how to go about replacing with the "-"

Answer 1

The outer loop should control which array element is not printed. So it might look something like this:

for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
    for (int j = 0; j < args.length; j++) {
        // first print a separator if not the first element on the line
        if (j > 0) System.out.print(" ");

        // now print either the j-th arg or a "-"
        if (j == i) {
            System.out.print("-");
        } else {
            System.out.print(args[j]);
        }
    }
    System.out.println();
}

Answer 2

Let's go over your code thought

int capacity = 1;
capacity += args.length;
String[] str = new String[capacity];

That means your str array has a length of 4, that's NOT what you want. it should just be:

String[] str = new String[args.length];

Now if you don't want to use args , you need to add elements to str :

for (int i=0; i<args.length; i++)
{
    str[i] = args[i];
}

Now that we made the array you can do the following:

String temp = "";
for (int i=0; i<str.length; i++)
{
    temp = "";
    for (int j=0; j<str.length; j++)
    {
        if (i == j) 
        {
            temp = temp + "-";
        }
        else
        {
            temp =  temp + str[j];
        }
    }
    System.out.println(temp);
}

Answer 3

The - comes in in the below order

first line : first place second line : second place third line : third place

so based on the series this can done by equating the nested loop variables as suggested bu others. Similar we can achieve any other logic