# Free Response - String Scramble A¶

The following is part a of a free response question from 2014. It was question 1 on the exam. You can see all the free response questions from past exams at https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-computer-science-a/exam-practice.

Question 1. This question involves reasoning about strings made up of uppercase letters. You will implement two related methods that appear in the same class (not shown). The first method takes a single string parameter and returns a scrambled version of that string. The second method takes a list of strings and modifies the list by scrambling each entry in the list. Any entry that cannot be scrambled is removed from the list.

Part a. Write the method scrambleWord, which takes a given word and returns a string that contains a scrambled version of the word according to the following rules.

• The scrambling process begins at the first letter of the word and continues from left to right.
• If two consecutive letters consist of an “A” followed by a letter that is not an “A”, then the two letters are swapped in the resulting string.
• Once the letters in two adjacent positions have been swapped, neither of those two positions can be involved in a future swap.

The following table shows several examples of words and their scrambled versions.

Figure 1: Example calls and results

import java.util.List;
import java.util.ArrayList;

public class ScrambledStrings
{
/********************** Part (a) *********************/

/** Scrambles a given word.
*  @param word the word to be scrambled
*  @return the scrambled word (possibly equal to word)
*  Precondition: word is either an empty string or
*                contains only uppercase letters.
*  Postcondition: the string returned was created
*                from word as follows:
*   - the word was scrambled, beginning at the
*     first letter and continuing from left to right
*   - two consecutive letters consisting of "A"
*     followed by a letter that was not "A" were
*     swapped
*   - letters were swapped at most once
*/
public static String scrambleWord(String word)
{
/* to be implemented in part a */
}

}


## How to solve this problem¶

The first thing to do is try to solve the examples by hand.

First try to solve “TAN”.

Figure 1: How to solve “TAN”

Now try to solve “ABRACADABRA”.

Figure 2: How to solve “ABRACADABRA”

Try to figure out the last two examples on your own.

## Figuring out the algorithm¶

It can help to write out what you need to do to get each of the characters to compare. The following shows what to do to solve the example with “ABRACADABRA”.

In this example we are looping through the characters from left to right one at a time and comparing the two adjacent characters. If the first is an “A” and the second is not we will swap the characters and then need to increment the index to not check the ones we swapped again. So we start checking the characters at index 0 and 1 and then swap them, but then move to comparing 2 and 3 rather than 1 and 2 which means we increment the current index by 2. If we don’t swap the characters we only increment the index by 1.

The following shows what to do to solve the example with “WHOA”.

In this case since we didn’t swap any characters we only increment the index by 1 each time through the loop.

The code will need to loop through the characters in the string and compare two adjacent characters. There are two ways to compare two adjacent characters without going beyond the bounds of the loop. One way is to start the index at 0 and loop while the index is less than one less than the length of the string and then get the characters at the index and at the index plus one. Another way is to start the index at 1 and loop while the index is less than the length of the string and then get the characters at one less than the index and at the index. If the first character is an “A” and the second is not an “A” then swap them and increment the index to make sure that you don’t check characters that have already been swapped. Each time through the loop also increment the index.

## Video - The algorithm¶

The video below explains the algorithm to use in solving the problem.

## Write the Code¶

Write the method scrambleWord below.

## Video - One way to code the solution¶

There are many possible solutions to this problem. The video below shows one solution.

Next Section - Loops - Summary