“The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”
-Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender
Unicode.
It’s the stuff that makes up all of our letters on a computer. It uses a numerical code to make a character, like the letter A. In fact, ‘A’ has a different unicode value than ‘a’. Now, ever heard of ASCII art? It uses those chars and makes it into an image. like this:
System.out.println(" | | ");
System.out.println(" | | ");
System.out.println(" | | ");
System.out.println(" | | ");System.out.println(" __ __ ");
System.out.println(" \ /");
System.out.println(" \ / ");
System.out.println(" \ / ");
System.out.println(" \ / ");
System.out.println(" \ / ");
System.out.println(" \/ ");
Hence making an arrow.
We want to create a program that can take in any word and output it as a banner and output it like this:
So what i did was I made a 5 by 7 grid.
0 1 2 3 4
_ _ _ _ _
0 |_|_|_|_|_|
1 |_|_|_|_|_|
2 |_|_|_|_|_|
3 |_|_|_|_|_|
4 |_|_|_|_|_|
5 |_|_|_|_|_|
6 |_|_|_|_|_|Turning bits on/off can give us letters. That means that each row is a 5-bit integer and each letter is a 7-element array of 5-bit integers.
This is the code for the letter A:
public static final Letter A = new Letter ('A', new int[]{14, 17, 17, 31, 17, 17,17});But when it was first run, the letters were on top of one another, not side by side. So for a given string, we have to take all of the letters and go row by row for all of them. So we added this function to fix that problem:
public String getRow(int row) {
int i = spec[row];
char[] line = new char[6];
for (int j = 0; j < 5; j++) {
line[j] = (((i >> j) & 1) == 0 ? ' ': letterType);
}
line[5] = ' ';
return new String(line);
}(spec means a specification. )
This makes each individual row of each letter into one single row, doing the same for each of the seven rows.
See the full code on gitHub here.
Have a little fun with this on IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition.
Signing out ‘till next time,
Avi
