Can you use the value of a variable to select an a…

I’m trying to try something out for my AP statistics class where I need to randomly select five words from the lyrics of a song and calculate the average length of those strings. This is what I have so far: (There’s 297 lyrics but I don’t want to type all of those out if it won’t work)

        String n001 = "I";
        String n002 = "look";
        String n003 = "and";
        String n004 = "stare";
        String n005 = "so";
        
        Random bob = new Random();
     
        String num_1 = String.format("%03d", bob.nextInt(298)); 
        System.out.println(num_1);
        String num_2 = String.format("%03d", bob.nextInt(298)); 
        System.out.println(num_2);
        String num_3 = String.format("%03d", bob.nextInt(298)); 
        System.out.println(num_3);
        String num_4 = String.format("%03d", bob.nextInt(298)); 
        System.out.println(num_4);
        String num_5 = String.format("%03d", bob.nextInt(298)); 
        System.out.println(num_5);
        
        String num1 = "n" + num_1;

What I can’t figure out is how to take the value in num1 to select one of the Strings named the same thing. I need to do that for all five selected random numbers.

I’m sure there’s a way to do this, but it’s my first year in a CS class and I can’t seem to find the answer anywhere.

Answer

Here is a suggestion.

put all the words in a List<String>
(e.g. List<String> = new ArrayList<>())
Use Collections.shuffle to shuffle the list.
then take the first 5 entries.

Doing the above will guarantee you won’t repeat any word unless there are duplicates in the list.

Figuring out how to average the lengths is up to you.

Can you use the value of a variable to select an already defined variable with that same name?

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Answer