Multidimensional array and chars

Question

Hi again,
My apologies in advance if i can't word my question that well, i will try and be as clear and succinct as possible and hopefully for this newbie you can apprehend what i'm trying to figure out if i come up short.
I'm trying to write a rather large control statement with a while loop and several nested ifs inside it that ultimately returns a single character after all is said and done, and then continually concatenates that character to a string which will eventually be output to a file. The part i'm stuck at is after i've changed the two letter characters into their ASCII values. I need to make the program take those two ASCII values and use them as a reference to a character in a multidimensional array of alphabetic characters, and then that character will be what is returned at the end.
Here's the method, thanks in advance for your time.
public String encode( String cipherKey )
        String textToEncode = input.next();
        String encodedText = " ";
        cipherKey = cipherKey.toUpperCase();
        textToEncode = textToEncode.toUpperCase();
        openFiles();
        int numberOfChars = textToEncode.length();
        int cipherPos = 0;
        int cipherLength = cipherKey.length();
        while (input.hasNext())
            for ( int count = 0; count < numberOfChars; count++ )
                if (Character.isLetter(textToEncode.charAt(count)))
                    cipherPos %= cipherLength;
                    int xChar = (int) textToEncode.charAt(cipherPos);
                    int yChar = (int) textToEncode.charAt(count);
                    xChar -= 65;
                    yChar -= 65;
                    if ((xChar >= 0) && (xChar <= 25))
                        if ((yChar >= 0) && (yChar <= 25))
                    return ' ';
                 encodedText = encodedText +
    return encodedText; 
    }As you can see towards the end there are some incomplete statements where i became lost.

Answer 1

its there, i couldnt c&p the whole program because it went over my character limit. Yeah it did compile but couldn't invoke my encode method without a NullPointerException.
Here are the other methods in the class....
    public String setSource( String in )
        source = in;
        return source;
     Sets the value of the output file
     * @param out A <code>String</code> value representng name of output file.
     * @see #setSource
    public String setDestination( String out )
        destination = out;
        return destination;
     * Method to open both input and output files, and to test for exceptions
     * @see #encode
     * @see #decode
    private void openFiles()
    File inputFile = new File(source);  //Creates new file object from source file
    File outputFile = new File(destination);  //Creates new file object from destination file
        /* Tests whether input file exists and if so enables the Scanner
         * to read the data in from the source file. Catches SecurityException and
         * FileNotFoundException amd prints appropriate messages to user.
        if (inputFile.exists())
            try
                input = new Scanner( new File( source ) );
                FileReader reader = new FileReader(inputFile);
                BufferedReader BufferIn = new BufferedReader(reader);
            catch ( SecurityException securityException )
                System.err.println("You do not have read access to this file.");
                System.exit( 1 );
            catch ( FileNotFoundException filesNotFoundException )
                System.err.println("Error: File does not exist.");
                System.exit( 1 );         
        /* Tests whether output file exists and if it does enables Formatter
         * to write encoded output to file. Catches SecurityException and
         * FileNotFoundException and prints appropriate message to user.
        if (outputFile.exists())
            try
                output = new Formatter( new File( destination ) );
            catch ( SecurityException securityException )
                System.err.println("You do not have write access to this file.");
                System.exit( 1 );
            catch ( FileNotFoundException filesNotFoundException )
                System.err.println("Error: File does not exist.");
                System.exit( 1 );
     * Closes both input and output files after output file has been written
     * to.
     * @see #openFiles
    private void closeFiles()
        if ( output != null )
            input.close();
            output.close();
    }Edited by: fearofsoftware on Apr 17, 2009 8:35 PM