why does my program loop infinitely?

Question

My spell checking program doesn't give any error codes, just spell-checks the same words over and over, infinitely. Is there a way to stop this infinite loop and put a cap on how many words it checks, for example, to end the code when ten incorrect words have been corrected?

I'm almost certain that the infinite loop is a result of this method here:

 public static void SpellChecker() throws IOException {
        dictionary = new Hashtable<String, String>();
        System.out.println("Searching for spelling errors ... ");

        try {
            // Read and store the words of the dictionary
            BufferedReader dictReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("dictionary.txt"));

            while (dictReader.ready()) {
                String dictInput = dictReader.readLine();
                String[] dict = dictInput.split("\\s"); // create an array of
                                                        // dictionary words

                for (int i = 0; i < dict.length; i++) {
                    // key and value are identical
                    dictionary.put(dict[i], dict[i]);
                }
            }
            dictReader.close();
            String user_text = "";

            // Initializing a spelling suggestion object based on probability
            SuggestSpelling suggest = new SuggestSpelling("wordprobabilityDatabase.txt");

            // get user input for correction
            while (!user_text.equalsIgnoreCase("q")) {
   // CleanString is a string full of words to be spell checked
                user_text = cleanString; 
                String[] words = user_text.split(" ");

                int error = 0;

                for (String word : words) {
                    suggestWord = true;
                    String outputWord = checkWord(word);

                    if (suggestWord) {
                        System.out.println("Suggestions for " + word + 
                        " are:  " + suggest.correct(outputWord) + "\n");
                        error++;
                    }
                }

                if (error == 0 & !user_text.equalsIgnoreCase("q")) {
                    System.out.println("No mistakes found");
                }
            }

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
             System.exit(-1);
        }
    }

Answer 1

You never ask the user if he/she wants to quit or not, from inside the while loop. So user_text is initialized with cleanString , and never changes inside the loop, hence the infinite loop.