Reference no: EM132207502

Write a program that will add the digits of a person's birth date to obtain a single digit to generate a numerology report.

First: Get a Date

Numerology has been used since ancient times to shed light on relationships, health and global events. Each element in a birth date is believed to possess a special numerical significance. We are going to develop our own rudimentary numerology prediction program. The first thing to do is ask the user to enter a birth date to process.

You will need to indicate to your user that they need to enter the month, day and year in that order separated by spaces and forward slashes, which look like this: /. An example would be 12 / 25 / 2112. The spaces must be present between the numeric and character input.

Second: Validate the Date

The important and time-consuming portion of this program is validating your input from the user. This means that you need to check to make sure the month is between 1 and 12, the day is appropriate for the month, and the year is between 1880 and 2280, inclusive.

By "the day is appropriate for the month and year", this means that if a date of January 32nd is entered or a date of June 0th is entered, you should recognize and report that. This also means that you should check to see that if the year is a leap year, you should allow February 29th and if it's not a leap year, you should disallow February 29th. See the "Solution Suggestions" for a website that discusses leap years.

Allow the user to input the entire date before you validate it.

You should continuously re-prompt the user for a date until a valid date is entered. If one part of the date fails (month, day or year), re-prompt for the entire date again. Do not simply re-prompt for the offending part of the date. Output appropriate error messages for the incorrect dates. See the example runs for sample error messages.

Third: Crunch the Date

Then, you need to calculate a single digit from the birth date. For example if your birth date is 3/19/1955 you add 3+1+9+1+9+5+5 to get 33. You would then break this apart and add 3+3 to get 6.

You will need to be careful because it is possible to have to "fold" the number more than just once, as in the above example. For example, if the birth date was 7/5/1942, you would add up the individual digits 7+5+1+9+4+2 to get 28, then you would need to add 2 + 8 to get 10. This is still a two-digit number, and needs to be added again - 1 + 0 - to get a single-digit result of 1.

You can simplify the process by adding the month day and year together first (i.e., 7+5+1942, to get 1954) and then breaking down and adding that result (1+9+5+4), which results in 19, which needs to be broken down again to get 1+9 which results in 10, which then results in 1+0, or 1. You should never have to crunch a number more than 3 times and will usually only need to add the digits once.

Output Specifications

Once you have obtained the single digit you are going to print out a numerology forecast for that number. If your number was 1, you would print out the numerology report for the number 1. Use the following one-line format for your output:

=1= Neither give cherries to pigs nor advice to a fool.

For your output, have the text =X= start the line, where X is the number of the numerology report surrounded immediately by equals signs and followed by a space. Then, issue your numerology forecast on the remainder of the line.

Use your own numerology forecasts for each number. Have fun, be creative, don't be mean-spirited and please keep the content to a PG-13 format (i.e., no foul language and nothing that is outright offensive; remember not to offend your instructor).

Solution Suggestions

It might actually be easier to work backwards solving this program, like this, checking each step as you complete it:

o The first thing you could do is write a switch statement that handles 9 possible numerology forecasts. Test this switch statement by using exact values for the switch's variable to make sure it works and outputs all 9 numerology forecasts before moving on.

o Then add the code to take a date and crunch it down to a single digit. This code should come before your switch statement. For simply testing this code, don't worry about validating the date or input format yet; declare three variables (for example: month, date, year), read in the date to process from the user and then feed that result into the switch statement you've already developed and that you know works from the previous step.

o Finally, add code to validate the date that you read from the keyboard before crunching it. Validation will need to include tests for the month, day and year as well as for using forward slashes between those pieces of information.