Hidden Word - Write Class

The following is a free response question from 2015. It was question 2 on the exam. You can see all the free response questions from past exams at https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-a/free-response-questions-by-year.

Question 2. Consider a guessing game in which a player tries to guess a hidden word. The hidden word contains only capital letters and has a length known to the player. A guess contains only capital letters and has the same length as the hidden word.

After a guess is made, the player is given a hint that is based on a comparison between the hidden word and the guess. Each position in the hint contains a character that corresponds to the letter in the same position in the guess. The following rules determine the characters that appear in the hint.

../_images/HiddenWordHints.png

Figure 1: The hints

The HiddenWord class will be used to represent the hidden word in the game. The hidden word is passed to the constructor. The class contains a method, getHint that takes a guess and produces a hint.

For example, suppose the variable puzzle is declared as follows.

HiddenWord puzzle = new HiddenWord("HARPS");

The following table shows several guesses and the hints that would be produced.

../_images/HiddenWordExamples.png

Figure 2: Example guesses and hints

Try and Solve It

Write the complete HiddenWord class, including any necessary instance variables, its constructor, and the method, getHint, described above. You may assume that the length of the guess is the same as the length of the hidden word.

The code below has comments to help you get started. It also has a main method for testing. Finish writing the class and use the main method to test it.

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