Important Notice:

Practice-It will be discontinued as of November 1st, 2024. After this date, the website will remain online for a transitional period, but login will be restricted to University of Washington NetID authentication. This marks the next phase towards the platform's full retirement. Thank you for your use and support of the application over the years.

If you are looking for an alternative, a similar tool, CodeStepByStep, was developed independently by the original author of Practice-It, and is available at codestepbystep.com**

logo Practice-It logo

Main Page → Problems → Solve a Problem

BJP4 Exercise 6.19: leetSpeak

Language/Type: Java file processing Scanner
Author: Marty Stepp (on 2016/09/08)

Write a method leetSpeak that accepts two parameters: a Scanner representing an input file, and a PrintStream representing an output file. Your method should convert the input file's text to "leet speak" (aka 1337 speak), an internet dialect where various letters are replaced by other letters/numbers. Output the leet version of the text to the given output file. Preserve the original line breaks from the input. Also wrap each word of input in parentheses. Perform the following replacements:

Original character 'Leet' character
o 0
l (lowercase L) 1
e 3
a 4
t 7
s (at the end of a word only) Z

For example, if the input file lincoln.txt contains the following text: 

four score and
seven years ago our

fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation

And your method is called in the following way: 

Scanner input = new Scanner(new File("lincoln.txt"));
PrintStream output = new PrintStream(new File("leet.txt"));
leetSpeak(input, output);

Then after the call, the output file leet.txt should contain the following text: 

(f0ur) (sc0r3) (4nd)
(s3v3n) (y34rZ) (4g0) (0ur)

(f47h3rZ) (br0ugh7) (f0r7h) (0n) (7hiZ) (c0n7in3n7)
(4) (n3w) (n47i0n)

You may assume that each token from the input file is separated by exactly one space.

Hint: You may want to use the String object's replace method, which is used as follows: 

String str = "mississippi";
str = str.replace("s", "*");    // str = "mi**i**ippi"
Type your solution here:


This is a method problem. Write a Java method as described. Do not write a complete program or class; just the method(s) above.

You must log in before you can solve this problem.


Log In

If you do not understand how to solve a problem or why your solution doesn't work, please contact your TA or instructor.
If something seems wrong with the site (errors, slow performance, incorrect problems/tests, etc.), please

Is there a problem? Contact a site administrator.