Question

I essentially want to search the frequency of a string. For example, if I pass in the word “I”, then the frequency of the word in the following sentence: “I went to the beach and I saw three people” should be 2. I’ve constructed such method in which I take a text (of any length), split it into an array by the white space, and loop through the array, searching if each index matches the word. Then, I increment the frequency counter and return the number as a string. Here’s the method:

private int freq() {
String text = "I went to the beach and I saw three people";
String search = "I";
String[] splitter = text.split("\\s+");
int counter = 0;
   for (int i=0; i<splitter.length; i++)
   {
       if (splitter[i]==search) 
       {
           counter++;
       }
       else
       {

       }
   }
   return counter;
       }

}  

This is outside the method:

String final = Integer.toString(freq());
System.out.println(final);

But as I run this, I keep getting 0 as the result. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

EDIT: You’re all correct! What a waste of a question :(.

Answer 1

Use equals instead of ==

if (text[i].equals(search) )
   {
       counter++;
   }

better solution

Use a Map to map the words Map<String,Integer> with frequency.

String [] words = line.split(" ");

Map<String,Integer> frequency = new HashMap<String,Integer>();

for (String word:words){

    Integer f = frequency.get(word);
    //checking null
    if(f==null) f=0;
    frequency.put(word,f+1);
}

Then you can find out for a particular word with:

frequency.get(word)