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

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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".

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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: 
To compute the average length of the items in a hash map, you'll have to iterate over them all and count the length and calculate the average.

As for your other question about what to use for a key, how are we supposed to know? A hashmap can use practically any\* value for a key.

\*The value must be hashable, which is defined differently for different languages.
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.