Question

So I have a String/txt file:
All purchases: blabla : 1 derp : 20 blabla : 1 herp : 30

This is just an example, a real file will be generated based on the users input

So what I need to do is combine the similar strings with similar names (First part) together and make them look like this: (name) : (number) x(amount of same strings)

For example lets take the file that we had:
All purchases: blabla : 1 derp : 20 blabla : 1 herp : 30

After parsing it must look like: All purchases: blabla : 1 x2 derp : 20 herp : 30

I have tried writing down the last value into a variable and checking it with the next value, but what if the values are in a different order? That’s where I got stuck.

Answer 1

Since each entry has three components:

[name] : [number]
You can do a few things here. Something along the lines of:

Scanner s = new Scanner(new File("YourFileHere.txt"));
ArrayList<String> entries = new ArrayList<String>();
while(s.hasNext())
{
    entries.add(s.next() + " " + s.next() + " " s.next());
}

You’ll of course have to remove the leading ‘All purchases:’, but now everything is in the arraylist in the form [name] : [number]

You simply have to determine how many of each there are. From here you can sort them and then count them.