I have an idea for a new Java program which requires information about my colleges schedule of classes. Specifically I want to know what all the Computer Science classes are, and what the prerequisites for each are. This information is readily available in the latest schedule of classes. The chore is to get that information into my program. How do you do that? You write a program of course.To start with, the schedule of classes is a huge PDF file. I used Adobe Acrobat to export this file to plain ASCII text. Then I wrote a small Java program to read in the file one line at a time. I coded in some rules to parse the lines to figure out which ones were computer science courses. So far I can detect all the CIS courses fine. For now I have the code just grabbing the text of the prerequisites for each class.
The next step is for me to build some structure which can easily represent the relationship between classes. Perhaps this is a big tree. I don't know. I do know that I must first read in all the information. Then I can make the connections in my tree. I already have a Java class called Course. And I have coded most of the logic into my Java class Parser. There are a lot more Java class before I have all the information that I want.
Sorry I have been a little cryptic about my eventual application which will require all this information. Perhaps when I am done I will upload the application here. For now I am keeping it on the down low. I am finding it hard to schedule time to work on my Java programming. As soon as my Java college class ended, there was nothing else driving me to code. And get this. The university does not offer a Java Programming 2 class. Go figure.
