Thread: Type casting error in Voting java program

Description of what the program should do:

1. The program should allow the user to enter the last names of five candidates in a local election and
   the votes received by each candidate.
2. The program should then output each candidate’s name, the votes received by the candidate and the percentage of the total votes received by the candidate.
3. The program should also output the winner of the election.
4. If the user enters a negative value for the number of votes received for a candidate then the program should set the value of vote for that candidate to zero.
5. If the user enters a last name in small letters the program should display the surname with the first character in capitals.

Here a Sample of Input and Output:

****values and names enter by the user is highlighted in green****

Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate
Jack
5000
Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate
Mike
4000
Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate
Joe
6000
Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate
Robin
2500
Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate
Tony
1800

Candidate Votes Received % of Total Votes

Jack 5000 25.906735751295333
Mike 4000 20.72538860103627
Joe 6000 31.088082901554404
Robin 2500 12.953367875647666
Tony 1800 9.32642487046632

Total 19300

The Winner of the Election is Joe.


My Code so far for this task:

import java.util.Scanner;
 
public class voting {
 
		public static void main(String[] args) 
 
		{
	    	int totalVotes = 0;
	    	float percentOfVotes;
	    	voting myTest = new voting();
	        String[] enteredNames = myTest.readNames();
	        int[] enteredVotes = myTest.readVotes();
 
	    for ( int i=0; i < enteredVotes.length; i++ )
	         {
	    	   totalVotes += enteredVotes[ i ];
	         }
	           System.out.println("Total" + " " +  totalVotes);
 
 
	    for( int i = 0; i < enteredVotes.length; i++)
	         {
	           percentOfVotes = ((enteredVotes[i]/totalVotes)*100);
 
	           System.out.println(enteredNames[i]+ " " +  enteredVotes[i] + " " + percentOfVotes  );
	          }
 
	    }
 
	    public String[] readNames()
 
	    {
 
	    	Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
	        String names[] = new String[5];
 
	    	        for (int i = 0; i < names.length; i++) 
	    	        {
	    	            System.out.println("Enter candidate's name");
	    	            String inputWord1 = in.next();
 
	    	            String firstLetter = inputWord1.substring(0,1);  [COLOR="Lime"]// Get first letter[/COLOR]
	    	            String remainder   = inputWord1.substring(1);    [COLOR="Lime"]// Get remainder of word.[/COLOR]
	    	            String capitalized = firstLetter.toUpperCase() + remainder.toLowerCase();
 
	    	            names[i] = capitalized; 
	    	        }
	    	       return ( names );
	    }	
 
	    private int[] readVotes()
	    {
	    int vote = 0;
 
		    int[] votes1 = new int[5];
 
		      for (int i = 0; i < votes1.length; i++) 
		      {
		      System.out.println("Enter candidate's votes");
		      vote = EasyIn.getInt();
		      votes1[i]= vote; 
		      	  if (votes1[i]<0)
		      	  {
		      	      votes1[i]=0;
		      	  }
		      }    	        
	          return ( votes1);
 
	     }	
 
}

My Sample of Input and Output for my code above:

****values and names enter by the user is highlighted in green****

Enter candidate's name
Alice
Enter candidate's name
john
Enter candidate's name
petEr
Enter candidate's name
thomas
Enter candidate's name
jerry
Enter candidate's votes
1293
Enter candidate's votes
1283
Enter candidate's votes
-923
Enter candidate's votes
-128
Enter candidate's votes
0

Total 2576

Alice 1293 0.0 //having trouble with the percentage of votes recieved.
John 1283 0.0
Peter 0 0.0
Thomas 0 0.0
Jerry 0 0.0


I have tried all that I can and now I need help for this community to fix the code.

Thank you in advance.

Java'88.

You're divinding int data types... Java is automatically truncating for you before casting it to float.

Cast the enteredVotes[i] to float so Java will auto-cast up to float at the beginning rather than at the end.

percentOfVotes = (((float)enteredVotes[i]/totalVotes)*100);

Okay, but what about the candidate's name and vote. As you can see I have to first ask for the names then again for the votes, which doesn't fit the description of program or the sample of how it should look like; any help on there, please .

oh, just print out only one string.

Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
for (int i = 0; i < enteredNames.length; i++)
{
     System.out.println("Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate");
     enteredNames[i] = in.nextLine();
     enteredVotes[i] = in.nextInt();
}

umm, i'm not sure if nextInt() will eat the newline character. If that doesn't work, try this:

Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
for (int i = 0; i < enteredNames.length; i++)
{
     System.out.println("Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate");
     enteredNames[i] = in.nextLine();
     enteredVotes[i] = in.nextInt();
     in.nextLine();
}

I'm effectively getting rid of the 2 helper methods you have. The reason is you can only return 1 value, but what you need is to get a candidate name and the number of votes. This is a possible solution:

import java.util.Scanner;
 
public class voting {
		public static void main(String[] args) 
		{
	    	int totalVotes = 0;
	    	float percentOfVotes;
	    	voting myTest = new voting();
	        String[] enteredNames = myTest.readNames();
	        int[] enteredVotes = myTest.readVotes();
                Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
	        for (int i = 0; i < enteredNames.length; i++)
	        {
	             System.out.println("Enter candidate's name and the votes received by the candidate");
	             enteredNames[i] = in.nextLine();
	             enteredVotes[i] = in.nextInt();
	        }
	    for ( int i=0; i < enteredVotes.length; i++ )
	         {
	    	   totalVotes += enteredVotes[ i ];
	         }
	           System.out.println("Total" + " " +  totalVotes);
 
 
	    for( int i = 0; i < enteredVotes.length; i++)
	         {
	           percentOfVotes = (((float)enteredVotes[i]/totalVotes)*100);
 
	           System.out.println(enteredNames[i]+ " " +  enteredVotes[i] + " " + percentOfVotes  );
	          }
 
	    }
}

Another thing you can do is create a Candidate class, and have that store the name and number of votes. It's not really necessary in this situation, but it might be good practice especially as you progress with Java/other OOP languages to learn when and how to create effective classes for encapsulating an idea.

Snice you have remove those methods what should I do with those two line of code? If I remove them I get lots of errors and if I keep them, Eclipse ask back for the method that you removed.

                .......
	        String[] enteredNames = myTest.readNames();
	        int[] enteredVotes = myTest.readVotes();
                .......

Then there is a problem of finding the winner of the election?

Originally Posted by helloworld922

Another thing you can do is create a Candidate class, and have that store the name and number of votes. It's not really necessary in this situation, but it might be good practice especially as you progress with Java/other OOP languages to learn when and how to create effective classes for encapsulating an idea.

What ever way you think is the best way, I'm happy with it.

Java'88

lol, oops. As you learn more about programming, you'll find that it's very rare there is only 1 right answer. However, there are a lot of wrong answers

Create an initial array to hold the names/votes:

String[] enteredNames = new String[5];
int[] enteredVotes = new int[5];

I didn't want to just post the code cause then you wouldn't learn anything useful. Instead, I'll describe the thought process.

The winner in the election is the person that has the most votes*. All you need to do is find the max of the list of number of votes. The indices of the votes match up with the name, so find which index had the most votes, then that index of the names list is the name of the winner

If you need help finding the max, please reply, but I'd like to see what kind of algorithm and reasoning you came up with for finding the index of the highest votes.

*Note:
This doesn't take into account ties, but then again that makes sense. If there was to be an exact tie in an election, who one? You wouldn't be able to tell from that election alone. You'd either have to decide on some pseudo-weird way for who won (the oldest wins, tallest wins, incumbent wins, etc.), or have a re-election. This is the nice part about programming: you can shove some details away, and make assumptions, but you should have code to handle this.
Ex: Everytime a tie is encountered, print out "There was a tie." and then quit. You can list out the names of those who tied, but that could potentially be everyone, so it's probably best to not unless you really want to or have to Also, it doesn't really matter if two losers tie, so long as at least 1 candidate had more votes. This may seem obvious, but depending on how you write your tie-checker, could fail in this case.

hehe, if you want the index you can't use the special for-each loop. You've got to do this:

 for(int  i = 0; i < votes.length; i++){
 
	        	if(votes[i]>votes[highest]){
	        		highest = i;
	        		}
	        	}

then you can do what you want with highest:

     System.out.println("The winner was " + names[highest] + " who received " + votes[highest]);

Thats why I was getting that horrible error

I was pass the value of highest vote as the index value for enteredNames but enteredNames's index only goes up to 4.

Now the program is complete. I also solved the issue, if there was a tie in the election

Thanks helloword922, I'm very grateful for your help.

Java'88.