Help please!! Arraylist Search/Count

Question

Hi everyone,
I'm very new to Java. My problem is this:
I have created a program that parses many XML files. Now I want to generate a report of the number of files that contain each unique date within the xml files.
For example:
Using the Filewriter, I will like to write the number of files out of the 100 present that contain the following dates:
2005-07-12
2005-08-11
So far my attempts are to store all the dates parsed into an arraylist. I've tried using the popular wordcount.java and many other examples to no avail. If there are any methods out there that can help me count the unique items present in the arraylist, I will really appreciate it.
If I going about it the wrong way and there's a better way, can some also be shout it out.
Many many thanks

Answer 1

If you can able to store all the dates in an array
list and want to find the uniques dates in that array
list, then this program is enough...
import java.util.*;
import java.awt.*;
public class forTelly{
ArrayList al;
forTelly(){
al=new ArrayList();
String s[]={
2005-07-12","2005-08-11","2005-07-12","2005-08-11",
2005-04-12","2005-03-11","2005-02-12","2005-01-11",
for(int i=0;i<s.length;i++)
al.add(s);
/* so now we can consider that your source
arraylist is al from this we are going to
find the number of unique dates...okay.....
rrayList aldest=new ArrayList();
/* we can create another array list in
which we will add all the unique date
for(int i=0;i<al.size();i++){
if(aldest.size() < 1)
aldest.add(al.get(i));
else{
if(!aldest.contains(al.get(i)))
aldest.add(al.get(i));
System.out.println("So the number of unique address
in the source Arr..Li...is:"+aldest.size());
public static void main(String args[]){
new forTelly();
Is this what you want???
Note: That < symbol may change to <> or >< so please
correct it...
pravinth,
Thanks for the code. I've already tried this snippet and it doesn't quite do what I need it to do as I have to cast the arraylist of objects to an string array  and then even when I do it still prints all the dates with the number of occurences instead of a simply summary of say:
2005-07-12: 2 files
2005-08-11: 2 files
2005-01-11: 1 files
etc. etc.
Will appreciate any further thought on this.
Thanks,