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

Your lastIndex += findStr.length(); was placed outside the brackets, causing an infinite loop (when no occurence was found, lastIndex was always to findStr.length()).

Here is the fixed version :

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 2

here is the other solution without using regexp/patterns/matchers or even not using StringUtils.

String str = "helloslkhellodjladfjhelloarunkumarhelloasdhelloaruhelloasrhello";
        String findStr = "hello";
        int count =0;
        int findStrLength = findStr.length();
        for(int i=0;i<str.length();i++){
            if(findStr.startsWith(Character.toString(str.charAt(i)))){
                if(str.substring(i).length() >= findStrLength){
                    if(str.substring(i, i+findStrLength).equals(findStr)){
                        count++;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        System.out.println(count);

Answer 3

The last line was creating a problem. lastIndex would never be at -1, so there would be an infinite loop. This can be fixed by moving the last line of code into the if block.

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 4

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

while((lastIndex = str.indexOf(findStr, lastIndex)) != -1) {
     count++;
     lastIndex += findStr.length() - 1;
}
System.out.println(count);

at the end of the loop count is 3; hope it helps

Answer 5

I'm very surprised no one has mentioned this one liner. It's simple, concise and performs slightly better than str.split(target, -1).length-1

public static int count(String str, String target) {
    return (str.length() - str.replace(target, "").length()) / target.length();
}

Answer 6

Here is the advanced version for counting how many times the token occurred in a user entered string:

public class StringIndexOf {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

        System.out.println("Enter a sentence please: \n");
        String string = scanner.nextLine();

        int atIndex = 0;
        int count = 0;

        while (atIndex != -1)
        {
            atIndex = string.indexOf("hello", atIndex);

            if(atIndex != -1)
            {
                count++;
                atIndex += 5;
            }
        }

        System.out.println(count);
    }

}