Hello to all,

With the help from yesterday I was able to clean up my strings as I needed but now I have hit another snag.

What I have is a string that lists all of the winning lottery numbers since it's inception. I am trying to play around with this data. I have successfully removed all of the text and extra whitespace from the file and am left with this type of format:

02 24 10     7     16     24     39     49     53

First three numbers are the date, followed by six lottery numbers. Occasionally throughout the string I also have this:

10     2010     1     12

which is the date the file was generated and the page number (eg. Jan 1, 2010 page 1 of 12)

This list is about 2000 lines long. I am trying to take each row and load it into an array. In my head I picture this:

[0]   [1]   [2]        [3]        [4]        [5]        [6]        [7]        [8]
02    24    10         7           16        24         39        49          53   [0]
??     ??    ??         ?            ??        ??         ??         ??          ??    [1]

All of the rows will have 8 indexes aside from the ones with the page and date. Not sure how I am going to handle those. My code is messy and very beginner I know, bet hey, I just getting started.

I was thinking that I could load the string inside of a nested loop to a 2d array. I was running into problems with trying to find a way to go over the string line by line and load it into the array. I tried using the split() function but every time processing came to a halt. I can only attribute this to the fact that I am shoving quite a bit of data through that function and it chokes. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Using the splitTokens() I was able to get even closer, for every row it would index 0 - 8 (or 0 - 3 on the date/page rows) so I think that I am getting close. I also believe that I should convert the data from strings to int, not sure why I'm thinking that but it just makes sense.

Ultimately, I was looking to parse the array and find the greatest occurrence of numbers. To see which number has been used the most. Sorry for the long post, but I know that more info is better than less. Loading this into a 2d array has me stumped. Any recommendations on this or comments on my code would be appreciated.  

Thanks

Code:

void setup() {
  String[] fileRaw = loadStrings("lottery") ;  // Load file
  int numLines = fileRaw.length ; // Find total number of lines
  clean(fileRaw) ; // Pass to clean
}

void clean(String[] lotteryRaw) {
  //for (int i = 0; i < lotteryRaw.length; i++) { // Commented out 
  for (int i = 1; i < 30; i++) {             // for testing
    String remWhitespace = lotteryRaw[i].replaceAll("[\\W]", " ") ; 
    String remTextLines = remWhitespace.replaceAll("[a-zA-Z]", "") ; 
    String cleanTrim = remTextLines.trim() ; // This is ugly I think.  
    loadArray(cleanTrim);  
  } 
}  

void loadArray(String cleanTrim) { 
  String[] q = splitTokens(cleanTrim, " "); 
  println(q) ;   
 // Print out the value of q, which is a nice list of the rows,
 // indexed 0 - 8 and 0 - 4, repeating over and over for 
 // each row. 
  
}