Shift cipher decoder

Question

I am trying to make a shift cipher decoder.
It should read in a encoded sentence, pick one word (I decided to go with the first word for now), and execute the shift process, and output all the combinations, then check against a dictionary to find all the valid words.
But for now, I am only working on the 1st case of the the algorithm, a to b, b to c etc. The other cases I plan to implement with a for loop. but that is neither here nor now. I am also ignoring the dictionary right now.
What I have is below:
import java.util.*;
import java.lang.*;
* Write a description of class ShiftCypher here.
* @author (your name)
* @version (a version number or a date)
public class ShiftCypher
    // instance variables - replace the example below with your own
    private String s;
    //private ArrayList< Character > sentence;
    //private char letters;
     * Constructor for objects of class ShiftCypher
    public ShiftCypher(String input)
        s=input;
     * split the string into each characters
     * @param  string s
     * @return     NA
    public void splitString ()
         //sentence = new ArrayList<Character>();
         String [] temp = null;
         temp=s.split(" ");
         //return s.toCharArray();
         dump(temp);
         shiftMachine(temp);
     * dump the temp string
    private void dump (String [] args) {
        System.out.println("-----------------------");
        for (int i=0; i<args.length; i++) {
            System.out.println(args);
System.out.println("-----------------------");
* gets the first word for shifting
* testing method to make sure it works
private void getFirstWord (String [] args) {
char letters [] = args[0].toCharArray();
for (int i=0; i<letters.length; i++) {
System.out.println(letters[i]);
private void shiftMachine (String [] args) {
int i;
char letters [] = args[0].toCharArray();
for (i=0; i<letters.length; i++){
letters[i]=letters[i]+1;
The idea is to shift the letters up by one, so a to b, b to c. I am assuming all lower cases. and all input will be chars.
My problem is with the shiftMachine method. The line where it says
letters=letters[i]+1
gives an error saying possible loss of precision. how do I fix that?
Thank you for your help
Davy
Edited by: Davy_Zou on 3-May-2008 6:28 AM

Answer 1

Yes, I did compile it. The shiftMachine method is the only thing I changed.
private void shiftMachine (String [] args) {
        int i,j;
        char letters [] = args[0].toCharArray();
            for (i=0; i<letters.length; i++){
                letters= (char)letters[i]+1;
ignore the integer j for now, it was for something else.  But as you can see, the only difference is the type casting I added. Yet I will get an error message about loss of precision.