How to count the number of occurrences of an element in a List

Question

I have an ArrayList, a Collection class of Java, as follows:

ArrayList animals = new ArrayList();
animals.add(\"bat\         


        

Answer 1

package traversal;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class Occurrance {
    static int count;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        List<String> ls = new ArrayList<String>();
        ls.add("aa");
        ls.add("aa");
        ls.add("bb");
        ls.add("cc");
        ls.add("dd");
        ls.add("ee");
        ls.add("ee");
        ls.add("aa");
        ls.add("aa");

        for (int i = 0; i < ls.size(); i++) {
            if (ls.get(i) == "aa") {
                count = count + 1;
            }
        }
        System.out.println(count);
    }
}

Output: 4

Answer 2

What you want is a Bag - which is like a set but also counts the number of occurances. Unfortunately the java Collections framework - great as they are dont have a Bag impl. For that one must use the Apache Common Collection link text

Answer 3

Alternative Java 8 solution using Streams:

long count = animals.stream().filter(animal -> "bat".equals(animal)).count();

Answer 4

Map<String,Integer> hm = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
for(String i : animals) {
    Integer j = hm.get(i);
    hm.put(i,(j==null ? 1 : j+1));
}
for(Map.Entry<String, Integer> val : hm.entrySet()) {
    System.out.println(val.getKey()+" occurs : "+val.getValue()+" times");
}

Answer 5

I'm pretty sure the static frequency-method in Collections would come in handy here:

int occurrences = Collections.frequency(animals, "bat");

That's how I'd do it anyway. I'm pretty sure this is jdk 1.6 straight up.

Answer 6

Sorry there's no simple method call that can do it. All you'd need to do though is create a map and count frequency with it.

HashMap<String,int> frequencymap = new HashMap<String,int>();
foreach(String a in animals) {
  if(frequencymap.containsKey(a)) {
    frequencymap.put(a, frequencymap.get(a)+1);
  }
  else{ frequencymap.put(a, 1); }
}