Counting word frequency

Question

Hi all,
I'm very new to Java, only a few months into it. I am working on a program that compresses a file, thread, string. Firstly it takes a string of undetermided length as input and using the delimiter splits the string, then places that string into a list. Then from that list I take out the recurring words with another list and return the index of where the words are, this has been done without any problems.
Next I want to get the word frequency and return the most common word into the first index following onto the next and so on. I am not sure how best to go about this. I did use a map but that just gives the frequency of the words without any ordering. Can anybody give me any suggestions that I could try bearing in mind that java is my first language so this is also a confidence building exercise.
Many thanks to anybody who responds.

Answer 1

littlejim4 wrote:
Hi all,
I'm very new to Java, only a few months into it. I am working on a program that compresses a file, thread, string. Firstly it takes a string of undetermided length as input and using the delimiter splits the string, then places that string into a list. Then from that list I take out the recurring words with another list and return the index of where the words are, this has been done without any problems.
Next I want to get the word frequency and return the most common word into the first index following onto the next and so on. I am not sure how best to go about this. I did use a map but that just gives the frequency of the words without any ordering. Can anybody give me any suggestions that I could try bearing in mind that java is my first language so this is also a confidence building exercise.
Many thanks to anybody who responds.Okay, so you have a Map with the 'word' as keys, and the 'frequency' as values, right?
If so, create a class (WordOccurrence for example) that holds a "word" and "occurrence" variable. Let that class also implement the Comparable interface. Now, when you can do something like this:
public static List<WordOccurrence> getWordOccurrances(String text) {
    // get the occurrence of each (unique) word
    Map<String, Integer> frequencyMap = getFrequencyMap(text);
    // create a lit to hold you WordOccurrence instances
    List<WordOccurrence> list = new ArrayList<WordOccurrence>();
    // for each word in your map, create a WordOccurrence instance
    for(String word : frequencyMap.keySet()) {
        list.add(new WordOccurrence(word, frequencyMap.get(word)));
    // sort the list of WordOccurrences
    Collections.sort(list);
    // return the sorted list
    return list;
}