Question

I am building a basic word frequency counter. The code is listed below:

public static List<Frequency> computeWordFrequencies(List<String> words) 
{
    List<Frequency> list_of_frequency = new ArrayList<Frequency>();
    List<String> list_of_words = words;
    int j = 0;
    for(int i=0; i<list_of_words.size(); i++)
    {

        String current_word = list_of_words.get(i);
        boolean added = false;
        if(list_of_frequency.size() == 0)
        {
            list_of_frequency.add(new Frequency(current_word, 1));
            System.out.println("added " + current_word);
        }
        else
        {

            System.out.println("Current word: " + current_word);
            System.out.println("Current Frequency: " + list_of_frequency.get(j).getText());
            if(list_of_frequency.contains(current_word))
            {
                list_of_frequency.get(j).incrementFrequency();
                System.out.println("found... incremented " + list_of_frequency.get(j).getText() + " frequency");
                added = true;
            }
            else
            {
                list_of_frequency.add(new Frequency(current_word, 1));
                System.out.println("added " + current_word);
                added = true;
            }
        }
    }
}

and the output I am getting is:

added I
Current word: am
Current Frequency: I
added am
Current word: very
Current Frequency: I
added very
Current word: good
Current Frequency: I
added good
Current word: at
Current Frequency: I
added at
Current word: being
Current Frequency: I
added being
Current word: good
Current Frequency: I
added good
Total item count: 7
Unique item count: 7
I:1
am:1
very:1
good:1
at:1
being:1
good:1

So I need a for loop to loop through the “list_of_frequency” but if I do that I run into other problems such as adding words repetitively. Is my logic right here and would there be a better way going about this project?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

you can do this using frequency method of Collections class

here is a sample:

public void wordFreq(){
String text = "hello bye hello a bb a bye hello";

        List<String> list = Arrays.asList(text.split(" "));

        Set<String> uniqueWords = new HashSet<String> (list);
        for (String word : uniqueWords) {
            System.out.println(word + ": " + Collections.frequency(list, word));
        }
}