How to count occurrence of an element in a List

Question

I have an ArrayList a collection class of java as follows.

ArrayList<String>animals = new ArrayList<String>();
animals.add("bat");
animals.add("owl");
animals.add("bat");
animals.add("bat");

As you can see the animals ArrayList consists of 3 bat elements and one owl element. I was wondering if there is any API in collection framework that returns the number of bat occurrences or is there a way to determine number of occurrences.

I found that google's collection multiset does have an api that returns total number of occurrences of an element. But that is compatible only with jdk1.5. Our product is currently in jdk 1.6. Hence cannot use it.

Answer 1

There is no native method in Java to do that for you. However, you can use CollectionUtils#countMatches() from Apache Commons-Collections to do it for you.

Answer 2

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); }
}

Answer 3

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 4

So do it the old fashioned way and roll your own:

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

void add(String name) {
     Integer value = instances.get(name);
     if (value == null) {
        value = new Integer(0);
        instances.put(name, value);
     }
     instances.put(name, value++);
}

Answer 5

I wonder, why you can't use that Google's Collection API with JDK 1.6. Does it say so? I think you can, there should not be any compatibility issues, as it is built for a lower version. The case would have been different if that were built for 1.6 and you are running 1.5.

Am I wrong somewhere?

Answer 6

Put the elements of the arraylist in the hashMap to count the frequency.

Answer 7

A slightly more efficient approach might be

Map<String, AtomicInteger> instances = new HashMap<String, AtomicInteger>();

void add(String name) {
     AtomicInteger value = instances.get(name);
     if (value == null) 
        instances.put(name, new AtomicInteger(1));
     else
        value.incrementAndGet();
}

Answer 8

This shows, why it is important to "Refer to objects by their interfaces" as described in Effective Java book.

If you code to the implementation and use ArrayList in let's say, 50 places in your code, when you find a good "List" implementation that count the items, you will have to change all those 50 places, and probably you'll have to break your code ( if it is only used by you there is not a big deal, but if it is used by someone else uses, you'll break their code too)

By programming to the interface you can let those 50 places unchanged and replace the implementation from ArrayList to "CountItemsList" (for instance ) or some other class.

Below is a very basic sample on how this could be written. This is only a sample, a production ready List would be much more complicated.

import java.util.*;

public class CountItemsList<E> extends ArrayList<E> { 

    // This is private. It is not visible from outside.
    private Map<E,Integer> count = new HashMap<E,Integer>();

    // There are several entry points to this class
    // this is just to show one of them.
    public boolean add( E element  ) { 
        if( !count.containsKey( element ) ){
            count.put( element, 1 );
        } else { 
            count.put( element, count.get( element ) + 1 );
        }
        return super.add( element );
    }

    // This method belongs to CountItemList interface ( or class ) 
    // to used you have to cast.
    public int getCount( E element ) { 
        if( ! count.containsKey( element ) ) {
            return 0;
        }
        return count.get( element );
    }

    public static void main( String [] args ) { 
        List<String> animals = new CountItemsList<String>();
        animals.add("bat");
        animals.add("owl");
        animals.add("bat");
        animals.add("bat");

        System.out.println( (( CountItemsList<String> )animals).getCount( "bat" ));
    }
}

OO principles applied here: inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, encapsulation.

Answer 9

If you are a user of my ForEach DSL, it can be done with a Count query.

Count<String> query = Count.from(list);
for (Count<Foo> each: query) each.yield = "bat".equals(each.element);
int number = query.result();

Answer 10

This is an example where C# shines compared to Java. In C#, you would need only do this:

var count = (from a in animals where a.value = "bat" select a).Count();

Unfortunately, Java doesn't have anything like Linq or lambda's, so your'e stuck doing it the interative way that others suggest.

Answer 11

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.