Students asking for help

 | 1 min

My students are currently trying to implement a CSV import function for an assignment due tomorrow. They have to read lines from a CSV file, split those up into values, strip off any extra quotes, and then use these values to set properties of an object. It's not terribly difficult, but I haven't given them an entire code example that they can just copy and paste to do this. They actually have to figure out some of the logic themselves, and then find some functions to help them. In particular, they have to handle the stripping of quotes and figure out how to ignore the header row.

This is an excerpt from one email I received this evening:

When i click the button, some error happened.  I do not know how can i solve this problem.  Could you please tell me how to figure it out?

This is another except from a different student I got about 5 minutes later:

As you said in the last email. I tried to [do some stuff]. However, when I set a break point while running it, I got an exception.  Please help me on this.

Sigh. I guess at least this student said they got an exception - that's better than 'some error'.