Reading in character by character in file

Question

I am currently working on a primitive ants vs zombies game for a class project. We are to read in a 'horde' file that contains characters corresponding to a Zombie that will be invading and an integer(1-9inclusive) that represents a multiple of the previous zombie char. What I am having trouble is differentiating between int and char within the file string and how to create multiple objects depending on the int. This is what I have so far:

public void readHordeFile(String filename){
    try {
        file = new FileReader(filename);
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
        System.out.println("File not found " + e.getMessage());
    }
    buf = new BufferedReader(file);
    try {
        zombieString = buf.readLine();
        for(int i = 0; i < zombieString.length(); i++){
            if(zombieString.charAt(i) == 'S'){
                horde.add(new ZombieScientist());
            }else if(zombieString.charAt(i) == 'Z'){
                horde.add(new StandardZombie());
            }else if(zombieString.charAt(i) == 'I'){
                horde.add(new InfectedZombie());    
            }else if(zombieString.charAt(i) == 1){

            }
        }
    } catch (IOException e) {   
        e.getMessage();
    }

}

an example file contains : SZI1

I was thinking of just hard-coding each number but I still run into the problem of not knowing how to add multiples of the same object. I would really appreciate any help. Thank you all in advance.

Answer 1

You can still check integer in char format like this.

else if(zombieString.charAt(i) == '1'){

        }

if it is 1,2 or 3 you can check it in this way.

if you want to add multiple objects you can create a list of objects and add to "horde" object

Answer 2

To tell if a code point in a string is numeric you use the Character.isDigit method; to get a portion of your string into an int you use the Integer.parseInt method.

Answer 3

A few things; this is un-tested code so take it as more of a hint;

You should probably start by breaking the zombie creation up into its own method, so your loop looks something like;

zombieString = buf.readLine();
for(int i = 0; i < zombieString.length(); i++){
    Character ch = zombieString.charAt(i);
    addZombie(horde, ch);
}

Then you could just save the latest created zombie in a state variable;

Character previousZombie = ' ';
zombieString = buf.readLine();
for(int i = 0; i < zombieString.length(); i++){
    Character ch = zombieString.charAt(i);
    previousZombie = ch;        
    addZombie(horde, ch);
}

...and add a check if the next character is a digit and if so just add the correct number of the previous zombie.

Character previousZombie = ' ';
zombieString = buf.readLine();
for(int i = 0; i < zombieString.length(); i++){
    Character ch = zombieString.charAt(i);
    if(!Character.isDigit(ch))
    {
        previousZombie = ch;
        addZombie(horde, ch);
    }
    else
    {
        for(int j='1'; j<ch; j++)
            addZombie(horde, previousZombie);
    }
}