Thread: Very basic program but its making me crazy

First post , hello

I'm new to java and I'm trying to get this basic program working to find the shortest word in a string.
for some reason when it runs it will always declare the last word entered in the string as being the shortest word , regardless how many letters are in it or if its a word or an integer entered.

Can anyone see what im doing wrong?

                String  sentence; 
		String  shortestword;
		String  word;
		int       spacePos;
 
		shortestword = "";
 
		System.out.print("Please enter a sentence: ");
		sentence = getString();
 
			do{
 
 
				spacePos = sentence.indexOf(" ");
 
 
				if (spacePos == -1)
 
			{
					word = sentence;
 
			} 
 
				else
 
				{
 
				word = sentence.substring(0,spacePos);
				sentence = sentence.substring(spacePos +1);
 
                }
 
 
				if(word.length() > shortestword.length())
 
 
			{
				   shortestword = word;
			}
 
 
			   }
 
			   while (spacePos != -1);
 
			   System.out.println("The shortest word is " + word)

When posting code, make sure you use the code or highlight tags to preserve formatting. Also, make sure it's in the form of an SSCCE (that's a link).

But have you tried putting in some print statements to figure out what's going on? Or better yet, have you tried running through this with a debugger?

From my point of view, Debugger might be over the top for a beginner but that's not here or there.
Problems in your program are very small, and once you spot them, it will take seconds to adjust.
I recommend checking out:

• Equality and Relational Operators
• And secondly, just proof read your code, think carefully about what you're trying to print, where and why.

Deeply sorry, Posted advice without checking it on my own System! Although suggestions I pointed towards were needed, It was not a clear-cut (Quote: Few second Job) like I said.

Look into the split method of the String class:
String (Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.2)

By splitting up your sentence, and storing it into a String Array, you can easily go through the array comparing lengths with only a fraction of your code.

The parameter of split() is something you consider to be a good checkpoint to split the string, such as : or a whitespace.

Click here for details on for loops
Click here for an example of String.split() in action.

Again, very sorry for not checking my post before saying It was a 2 second job for you