I wrote up a program that can sort words and determine any anagrams. I want to generate an array of random strings so that I can test my method\'s runtime.
publi
Why generating random words? When you can use some dictionaries.
If you want random words without using a dictionary...
Repeat these steps for the number of words you want to generate.
RandomStringUtils from commons-lang
You can call this method for each word you want to generate. Note that the probability of generating anagrams should be relatively low though.
String generateRandomWord(int wordLength) {
Random r = new Random(); // Intialize a Random Number Generator with SysTime as the seed
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(wordLength);
for(int i = 0; i < wordLength; i++) { // For each letter in the word
char tmp = 'a' + r.nextInt('z' - 'a'); // Generate a letter between a and z
sb.append(tmp); // Add it to the String
}
return sb.toString();
}
If you want to generate random words of a given length, you'll either need an algorithm to determine if a given string is a word (hard), or access to a word list of all the words in a given language (easy). If it helps, here's a list of every word in the Scrabble dictionary.
Once you have a list of all words in a language, you can load those words into an ArrayList
or other linear structure. You can then generate a random index into that list to get the random word.
Do you need actual English words, or just random strings that only contain letters a-z?
If you need actual English words, the only way to do it is to use a dictionary, and select words from it at random.
If you don't need English words, then something like this will do:
public static String[] generateRandomWords(int numberOfWords)
{
String[] randomStrings = new String[numberOfWords];
Random random = new Random();
for(int i = 0; i < numberOfWords; i++)
{
char[] word = new char[random.nextInt(8)+3]; // words of length 3 through 10. (1 and 2 letter words are boring.)
for(int j = 0; j < word.length; j++)
{
word[j] = (char)('a' + random.nextInt(26));
}
randomStrings[i] = new String(word);
}
return randomStrings;
}