Java Horner's polynomial accumulation method

Question

So far, I have this code, which, in summary, takes two text files and a specified block size in cmd and standardises the txt files, and then puts them into blocks based on the specified block size.

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class Plagiarism {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        //you are not using 'myPlag' anywhere, you can safely remove it
//      Plagiarism myPlag = new Plagiarism();

        if (args.length == 0) {
            System.out.println("Error: No files input");
            System.exit(0);
        }

        String foo = null;
        for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++) {
            BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(args[i]));
            foo = simplify(reader);
            // System.out.print(foo);
            int blockSize = Integer.valueOf(args[2]);

            List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
            for (int k = 0; k < foo.length() - blockSize + 1; k++) {
                list.add(foo.substring(k, k + blockSize));
            }
            // System.out.print(list);
        }



    }

    public static String simplify(BufferedReader input)
            throws IOException {

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        String line = null;
        while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
            sb.append(line.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z]", "").toLowerCase());
        }
        return sb.toString();
    }
}

The next thing I would like to do is use Horner's polynomial accumulation method (with set value x = 33) to convert each of these blocks into a hash code. I am completely stumped on this and would appreciate some help from you guys!

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any advice given!

Answer 1

Horner's method for hash generation is as simple as

int hash=0;
for(int i=0;i<str.length();i++)
  hash = x*hash + str.charAt(i);