Author: Stan Eisenstat
Subject: Re: [Cs223] Non-alpha characters in standard input
Date: Wednesday, 22 Apr 2020, 19:48:06

    > Message Posted By: Unknown
    >
    > Hwk6/Boggle doesn't quit when non-alpha characters are present in the
    > standard input. Does it store any of the characters preceeding the
    > non-alpha character in the trie. For instance, if "blu3" was one of the
    > words in the standard input, does Hwk6/Boggle create trie nodes for 'b',
    > 'l', and 'u' with null values? Does it create them and then remove them
    > when it reads in the 3?

As stated in the specification,

  3. To make Boggle slightly more robust (and able to use dictionaries such as
     /c/cs223/Doc/words that contain ', -, &, etc.), lines in the standard input
     that contain nonalphabetic characters are ignored and do not provoke error
     messages.

Thus when Boggle reads a line like "blu3", it ignores
it and moves onto the next line.  How this is done is
implementation-dependent.  However, removing nodes as
described above would not be correct if the word "blu"
was already in the dictionary.

--Stan-