Remove a 3x3 array from a 9x9 array

Question

I am trying to recreate sierpinski carpet in Java using recursion.

Say I have the following:

static int size  = 9;
static char[][] board = new char[size][size];

And I wanted to remove the middle 3x3 sub array, how would I go about doing this using only recursion?

Answer 1

You cannot remove a sub array from an array declared like you are declaring it. But you can absolutely copy it. I have added comments in the solution below for you to fill in.

public char[][] copySubArray(char[][] orig, int colWidth, int rowHeight, int start_x, int start_y) {
  //do bounds testing on orig based on starting values and width/height
  char[][] copy = new char[colWidth][rowHeight];
  //copy values from orig to copy
  return copy;
}