Hello, and welcome to today's Java lesson! We are going to unravel a compelling challenge that will refine our skills in string manipulation. This lesson will place particular emphasis on nested loops. Prepare yourself for an intriguing adventure as we explore how to extract odd-indexed characters from each word in a sentence, but only if the word has an even number of characters. Does that sound exciting? Let's dive in!

The task we'll be demonstrating is as follows: We will work with a string representing a sentence in which words are separated by spaces. Your challenge involves creating a Java function that identifies the odd-indexed characters of words that have an even number of characters and then combines these characters into a single string, maintaining the order in which they appeared in the sentence.

Consider this example: "Java programming language is versatile." The word Java has 4 characters (an even number), and we'll select the odd-indexed characters from this word, specifically, a and a. Similarly, we'll select a, g, a, and e from language, and s from is, e, s, t, l, and . from versatile.. We'll skip the word programming because it has an odd length.

If our function is working correctly, it should return "aaagaesestl.". Isn't it fascinating to see what we can extract from a simple sentence?

We will start by splitting the sentence into words using the split method. This will help us create an array containing all the words in the sentence.

Java
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1import java.util.ArrayList;
2
3public class Solution {
4    public static String solution(String sentence) {
5        String[] words = sentence.split(" ");
6        // we will proceed progressively
7    }
8}

We now introduce nested loops: an outer loop that iterates over every single word, and an inner loop that checks every character within each word. First, we'll use an if condition to verify whether a word has an even length. We can determine this by checking whether the length of the word mod 2 equals zero. If it does, the word has an even length!

Java
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1import java.util.ArrayList;
2
3public class Solution {
4    public static String solution(String sentence) {
5        String[] words = sentence.split(" ");
6
7        for (String w : words) {
8            if (w.length() % 2 == 0) {  // check if the length of the word is even
9                // we are building up our solution gradually
10            }
11        }
12    }
13}

With our outer loop set, we're ready to implement our inner loop. We aim to iterate only over the odd-indexed characters in each word of even length. To accomplish this, we'll start from an index of 1 and increment by 2 each time. This method ensures our loop only selects the characters at odd indexes.

We'll then append these characters to our result string, which will be returned as our final output.

Java
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1import java.util.ArrayList;
2
3public class Solution {
4    public static String solution(String sentence) {
5        String[] words = sentence.split(" ");
6
7        String result = "";
8        for (String w : words) {
9            if (w.length() % 2 == 0) {  // confirms if the length of the word is even
10                for (int i = 1; i < w.length(); i += 2) {  // loop over odd-indexed characters
11                    result += w.charAt(i);
12                }
13            }
14        }
15        return result;
16    }
17
18    public static void main(String[] args) {
19        System.out.println(solution("Java programming language is versatile."));
20    }
21}

Well done! You've successfully navigated the realms of nested loops to extract specific characters from words within a sentence. You've learned how to analyze a sentence by breaking it down into its constituent words and studying each word at a deeper level. Now, use this knowledge as a solid foundation in your further exploration of nested loops and string manipulations. The key to mastering this topic is practice; the more you apply what you've learned, the more concrete your understanding becomes. Are you excited to continue exploring nested loops, string manipulations, and the endless possibilities of Java? Let's keep diving deeper!