Question: Im given a task which i am a little confused to understand. Here is the question statement:

---

The following program should read a file and store all its tokens in a member variable.
Your task is to write a single method that returns the number of items in tokenMap, the average length (as double value) of the elements in tokenMap, and the number of tokens starting with character "a".

---

Here the tokenMap is an object of type `HashMap<String, Integer>`;

I do have some idea about HashMap but what i want to know the "key value" for HashMap required is a single character or the whole word?? that i should store in tokenMap.

Also how can i compute the average length?

Answer: 
Reading the question closely, it seems that you have to read a file, extract each word and use it as the key value, and store the length of each key as the integer: 

```
an example line

```

leads to a HashMap like this

```
an : 2
example : 7
line : 4

```

After you've built your map (made of keys mapping to entries, or seemingly elements in the question), you'll need to run some statistics over it to find 

1. the number of keys (look at HashMap)
2. the average length of all keys (again, simple enough)
3. the number beginning with "a" (just look at the String)

Then make a value object containing these values and return it from the method that does the statistics. 

I know I've given more information that you require, but someone else may benefit from a little extra help.
Guys there is some confusion. Im not asking for a solution. Im just confused for one thing.
For the time being, im gonna use String type as the key type.

The only confusion i have is once i read the file line by line, should i split it based upon words or based upon each character. So that the key value should be a single character type string or a String of whole word.

If you can go through the question statement, what do you suggest. That's all im asking.