Occurrences of substring in a string

Question

Why is the following algorithm not halting for me? (str is the string I am searching in, findStr is the string I am trying to find)

String str = "helloslkhellodjladfjhello";
String findStr = "hello";
int lastIndex = 0;
int count = 0;

while (lastIndex != -1) {
    lastIndex = str.indexOf(findStr,lastIndex);

    if( lastIndex != -1)
        count++;

    lastIndex += findStr.length();
}

System.out.println(count);

Answer 1

As @Mr_and_Mrs_D suggested:

String haystack = "hellolovelyworld";
String needle = "lo";
return haystack.split(Pattern.quote(needle), -1).length - 1;

Answer 2

How about using StringUtils.countMatches from Apache Commons Lang?

String str = "helloslkhellodjladfjhello";
String findStr = "hello";

System.out.println(StringUtils.countMatches(str, findStr));

That outputs:

3

Answer 3

try adding lastIndex+=findStr.length() to the end of your loop, otherwise you will end up in an endless loop because once you found the substring, you are trying to find it again and again from the same last position.

Answer 4

Here it is, wrapped up in a nice and reusable method:

public static int count(String text, String find) {
        int index = 0, count = 0, length = find.length();
        while( (index = text.indexOf(find, index)) != -1 ) {                
                index += length; count++;
        }
        return count;
}

Answer 5

Based on the existing answer(s) I'd like to add a "shorter" version without the if:

String str = "helloslkhellodjladfjhello";
String findStr = "hello";

int count = 0, lastIndex = 0;
while((lastIndex = str.indexOf(findStr, lastIndex)) != -1) {
    lastIndex += findStr.length() - 1;
    count++;
}

System.out.println(count); // output: 3

Answer 6

A shorter version. ;)

String str = "helloslkhellodjladfjhello";
String findStr = "hello";
System.out.println(str.split(findStr, -1).length-1);