Hi, can someone please help me with this? I've been having a lot of trouble with it. The assignment

Your job in this assignment is to write a program that takes a message as a string and reduces the number of characters it uses in two different set ways. The first thing your program will do is ask the user to type a message which will be stored as a String. The String entered should be immediately converted to lowercase as this will make processing much easier. You will then apply two different algorithms to shorten the data contained within the String.

Algorithm 1

This algorithm creates a string from the message in which every vowel (a, e, i, o, and u) is removed unless the vowel is at the very start of a word (i. e., it is preceded by a space or is the first letter of the message). Every repeated non-vowel character is also removed from the new string (i. e., if a character appears several times in a row it should only appear once at that location). So for example the string "I will arrive in Mississippi really soon" becomes "i wl arv in mssp rly sn".

After applying this algorithm, your program should output the shortened message, the number of vowels removed, the number of repeated non-vowel characters removed, and how much shorter the shortened message is than the original message. The exact format in which the program should print this information is shown in the sample runs.

Algorithm 2

This algorithm creates a string by taking each unique character in the message in the order they first appear and putting that letter and the number of times it appears in the original message into the shortened string. Your algorithm should ignore any spaces in the message, and any characters which it has already put into the shortened string. For example, the string "I will arrive in Mississippi really soon" becomes "8i1w4l2a3r1v2e2n1m5s2p1y2o".

After applying this algorithm, your program should output the shortened message, the number of different characters appearing, and how much shorter the shortened message is than the original message. The exact format in which the program should print this information is shown in the sample runs.

Sample Run 1
Type the message to be shortened
This message could be a little shorter

Algorithm 1
Vowels removed: 11
Repeats removed: 2
Algorithm 1 message: ths msg cld b a ltl shrtr
Algorithm 1 characters saved: 13

Algorithm 2
Unique characters found: 15
Algorithm 2 message: 4t2h2i4s1m5e2a1g1c2o1u3l1d1b2r
Algorithm 2 characters saved: 8
Sample Run 2
Type the message to be shortened
I will arrive in Mississippi really soon

Algorithm 1
Vowels removed: 11
Repeats removed: 6
Algorithm 1 message: i wl arv in mssp rly sn
Algorithm 1 characters saved: 17

Algorithm 2
Unique characters found: 13
Algorithm 2 message: 8i1w4l2a3r1v2e2n1m5s2p1y2o
Algorithm 2 characters saved: 14
Milestones
As you work on this assignment, you can use the milestones below to inform your development process:

Milestone 1: Set up a program that takes a string input and converts all the letters to lowercase. Start implementing algorithm 1: create a counter variable and iterate through the characters of the String, incrementing this each time a vowel is encountered which is not preceded by a space or is at the start of the String. So at the end of the loop this counts the number of vowels that are not at the start of a word.

Milestone 2: Add further conditions (using else if) in your loop to count any non-vowel characters which appear immediately after the same character. Make a new empty String to hold the shortened message at the start of the code, then add a final else condition in the loop to add all characters which were not vowels or repeated letters to this String. Then print the statements for algorithm 1 using your counts and shortened message.

Milestone 3: Start implementing algorithm 2 by writing code that iterates through the String and checks that each character is not a space and has not already appeared in the word before that point. You will need to use nested loops - an outer loop to iterate through the String characters and an inner loop that looks through the previous characters up to that point - and a flag variable to record if a letter was found in the inner loop. Use a counter variable to count all such "unique" characters in the String.

Milestone 4: Add a second inner loop inside the outer loop from the previous which counts all appearances of a character that passes the tests from milestone 3. Add the character and the number of times it appears to another shortened message String (which should start as blank String). Finally, print the statements for algorithm 2 using your unique character count and shortened message.