string - Justify text in Java

Question

I have to read in an integer which will be the length of the succeeding lines. (The lines of text will never be longer than the length provided).

I then have to read in each line of text and convert the spaces to an underscore as evenly as possible. For example:

I would enter the line length of 30. Then a line of text Hello this is a test string. Then all of the spaces will be converted to underscores and padded out so that the text fills the given line length like so: Hello__this__is__a_test_string. As you can see, the original text had a length of 27 characters, so to pad it out to 30 characters I had to add 3 extra spaces to the original text and then convert those spaces to the underscore character.

Please can you advise a way that I can go about this?

Answer 1

What I do is split the sentence in to words. Then figure out how many spaces need to be added. Then iterate over the words and add a space to each one until you run out of spaces to add. If you have enough spaces where you need to add more than one to the words (like you have 5 words, but need to add 13 spaces), simply divide the number of spaces left by the number of words, and add that number to each word first. Then you can take the remainder and iterate across the words adding a space until you're done. Also make sure that you only add spaces to all but the last word in the sentence.