Array Trouble

Question

So I am new to Java, and took my first semester of a java course. It was hard for me at first, but I am slowly improving. My professor posted this as our last assignment for the semester, and I am having trouble with it as it involves arrays. I do not really know where to start, and any help would be greatly appreciated. I will post the assignment below, followed by the small bit of code I have so far. By no means do I want the answers to this, as I actually do enjoy learning, but any type of help, input, suggestions, etc are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Write a program which prompts the user to input a series of characters, one at a time. The program will stop prompting the user for characters once the user enters an exclamation point ('!').
Using an array, count the number of occurrences of each letter (regardless of whether it is upper or lower case (so for example, an 'A' and an 'a' both count for the first letter of the alphabet). In a separate counter, also count the total number of "other" characters ('.', '?', ' ', '2', etc.). The final exclamation point does not count.
Print out the count for each letter found (but not for those which where not found!)
Print the count of the non-letter characters.
List the characters that were not found (e.g. "The following letters were not found: t, z, c.").
By inspecting the array, print out the total number of all of the vowels, and the total number of all of the consonants.
Finally, print out which letter was found the most times. (Note there may be more than one letter which has the maximum count attached to it.) Also, print out which letter (or letters) was found the least number of times, but make certain to exclude letters which were not found at all.
This is the small amount of code I have thus far.
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;
public class asgn6 {
   public static void main( String[] args )
      int character;
       String letter = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Please enter a letter (Type ! when finished) ");
       character = Integer.parseInt (letter);
     if(letter.equals("!"))
     System.exit(0);
}

Answer 1

derajfast wrote:
char letter;
do {
String input = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Please enter a letter (Type ! when finished) ");
letter= input.charAt(0);
}while (letter != '!');So I figured out the loop!Exellent, that's exactly right.
Now I need a lot of assistance for the arrays part, as that is what I understand least with this assignment.The easiest way I see it is to make an array of ints 128 elements long. Each element is the counter for the character that indexes it.
For instance, 'A' is ASCII 65. So array[65] is the counter for how many times 'A' has been seen. You can use chars like you would use ints, so you can do this: array['A'] and it will convert it to it's ASCII value. Each time you read an input char, increment array[letter].
Then when you're done with input, you can print out each one like this
for each element i in the array
   print out (char)i followed by array