Question

I’ve two lists A and B. I’d like to find out indexes of elements in A that match elements of listB. Something like this:

ArrayList listA = new ArrayList();
listA.add(1);listA.add(2);listA.add(3);listA.add(4);
ArrayList listB = new ArrayList();
listB.add(2);listB.add(4);
ArrayList listC = new ArrayList();
for(int i=0; i<listB.size();i++) {
   int element = listB.get(i);
   for(int j=0; j<listA.size(); j++) {
      if(listA.get(j) == element) listC.add(j);
   }
}

I guess that’s one ugly way to doing it. What is the best way to finding all the indexes of A that match all elements in B? I believe there exists a method called containsAll in collections api – don’t think it returns matching indexes.

Answer 1

If you had to use an ArrayList, you could create a HashSet from the ArrayList. This would make the call to contains O(1). It would take O(n) to create the HastSet. If you could start with a HashSet, that would be best.

public static void main(String[] args) 
{
    List listA = new ArrayList();
    listA.add(1);
    listA.add(2);
    listA.add(3);
    listA.add(4);
    List listB = new ArrayList();
    listB.add(2);
    listB.add(4);
    Set hashset = new HashSet(listA);

    for(int i = 0; i < listB.size(); i++) 
    {
        if(hashset.contains(listB.get(i))) 
        {
            listC.add(i);
            System.out.println(i);
        }
    }   
}