The user input for a calculating the tangent of a graph

Question

I am making a program that calculates the equation for the tangent of a graph at a given point and ideally I'd want it to work for any type of graph. e.g. 1/x ,x^2 ,ln(x), e^x, sin, tan. I know how to work out the tangent and everything but I just don't really know how to get the input from the user.

Would I have to have options where they choose the type of graph and then fill in the coefficients for it e.g. "Choice 1: 1/(Ax^B) Enter the values of A and B"? Or is there a way so that the program recognises what the user types in so that instead of entering a choice and then the values of A and B, the user can type "1/3x^2" and the program would recognise that the A and B are 3 and 2 and that the graph is a 1/x graph.

This website is kind of an example of what I would like to do be able to do: https://www.symbolab.com/solver/tangent-line-calculator

Thanks for any help :)

Answer 1

Parsing a formula from user input is itself a problem much harder than calculating the tangent. If this is an assignment, see if the wording allows for the choice of the functions and its parameters, as you're suggesting, because otherwise you are going to spend 10% of time writing code for calculating the derivative and 90% for reading the function from the standard input.

If it's your own idea and you'd like to try your hand at it, a teaser is that you will likely need to design a whole class structure for different operators, constants, and the unknown. Keep a stack of mathematical operations, because in 1+2*(x+1)+3 the multiplication needs to happen before the outer additions, but after the inner one. You'll have to deal with reading non-uniform input that has a high level of freedom (in whitespace, omission of * sign, implicit zero before a –, etc.) Regular expressions may be of help, but be prepared for a debugging nightmare and a ton of special cases anyway.

If you're fine with restricting your users (yourself?) to valid expressions following JavaScript syntax (which your examples are not, due to the implied multiplication and the haphazard rules of precedence thereof to the 1/...) and you can trust them absolutely in having no malicious intentions, see this question. You wouldn't have your expression represented as a formula internally, but you would still be able to evaluate it in different points x. Then you can approximate the derivative by (f(x+ε) - f(x)) / ε with some sufficiently small ε (but not too small either, using trial and error for convergence). Watch out for points where the function has a jump, but in basic principle this works, too.

Answer 2

Looks like you want to evalute the expression. In that case, you could look into Dijkstra's Shunting-Yard algorithm to convert the expression to prefix notation, and then evaluate the expression using stacks. Alternatively, you can use a library such as exp4j. There are multiple tutorials for it, but remember that you need to add operations for both binary and unary operations (binary meaning it supports 2 operations while unary is like sin(x)).

Then, after you evaluate the expression, you can use first principles to solve. I have an example of this system working without exp4j on my github repository. If you go back in the commit history, you can see the implementation with exp4j as well.