Question

I’ve been racking my brain for the past hour wondering how to do this. It’s more of a logic question than a technical question I think.

I have two strings and wish to count how many characters they have in common. I.e Emily + Andy = 1.

I thought I could maybe convert the strings to char arrays and use two For statements within each other to go through each possibility, but I’m not 100% on how I’d do that. I’ve scoured Google for an answer but I’m not getting anywhere.

I apologize for not providing any code, I don’t currently have any. I’m fairly new to Java and I’m not sure how to go about this.

Anyone have a solution?

Answer 1

First you have to remove duplicate letters in both strings, and then you have to compare. The below code is working fine.

public class CountDuplicates {

    /**
     * Author Krishnan
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
        String str1 = "palani";
        String str2 = "krishnan";
        String str11 = "";
        String str12 = "";
        char[] ch1 = str1.toCharArray();
        char[] ch2 = str2.toCharArray();
        int count = 0;
        for(int i=0; i<ch1.length; i++)
        {
            if(!str11.contains(ch1[i]+""))
            {
                str11 += ch1[i];
            }
        }
        for(int i=0; i<ch2.length; i++)
        {
            if(!str12.contains(ch2[i]+""))
            {
                str12 += ch2[i];
            }
        }   
        char[] ch11 = str11.toCharArray();
        char[] ch12 = str12.toCharArray();
        for(int i=0; i<ch11.length; i++)
        {
            for(int j=0; j<ch12.length; j++)
            {
                if(ch11[i] == ch12[j])
                {
                    count++;
                }
            }
        }
        System.out.println("Duplicate Letters: " + count);
    }

}

Output:

Duplicate Letters: 3