Java beginner here! As part of practicing programming, I've run into Pascal's triangle. I tried to implement a solution where the triangle is printed like so:
1
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
...
So roughly right-sided. My solution though runs into multiple errors, and although I would appreciate help with that, I would primarily like to know if I am thinking correctly with my solution. (For some functions I am using a custom library)
public static void main(String[] args) {
int input = readInt("Enter triangle size, n = ");
array = new int[input][input];
for (int i = 0; i < input; i++) { // rows
for (int j = 0; j < i + 1; j++) { // columns
if (i = 0) {
array[i][0] = 1;
} else if (i != 0 && i == j) {
array[i][j] = 1;
} else {
array[i][j] = array[i - 1][j] + array[i - 1][j - 1];
}
}
}
// print out only the lower triangle of the matrix
for (int i = 0; i < input; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < input; j++) {
if (i <= j) {
System.out.println("%d ", array[i][j]);
}
}
}
}
You were on the right track. Here's how I implemented it:
Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.print("Enter triangle size, n = ");
int n = sc.nextInt();
sc.close();
//This will be a jagged array
int[][] array = new int[n][0];
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
//Add the next level (it's empty at the start)
array[i] = new int[i + 1];
for (int j = 0; j <= i; j++) {
//At the ends, it's just 1
if (j == 0 || j == i) {
array[i][j] = 1;
} else { //The middle
array[i][j] = array[i - 1][j - 1] + array[i - 1][j];
}
}
}
for (int i = 0; i < n; i ++) {
for (int j = 0; j <= i; j++) {
//printf is what you use to do formatting
System.out.printf("%d ", array[i][j]);
}
//Without this, everything's on the same line
System.out.println();
}
Your else
part was correct, but you didn't check if j
equaled 0 before that. Instead of setting the current element to 1 when i
was 0 or when i
equaled j
, you should have done it when j
was 0 or when i
equaled j
. Because of this mistake, in later rows where i was not 0, but j was, you tried to access array[i - 1][j - 1]
, which was basically array[i - 1][-1]
, causing an IndexOutOfBoundsException
.
I also made a jagged array instead of an even matrix because it made more sense that way, but it shouldn't matter much.
Also, this wasn't an error, but you did else if (i!=0 && i==j)
The i != 0
part is unnecessary because you checked previously if i == 0
.