Help with arrays & counting characters in arrays

Question

I am trying to figure out how to count how many times each characters appears in the array (but I have to do all the counts at once).
I am supposed to store the counts in an int[] array of 27 elements (26 letters & an extra count for everything else). How would I go about declaring the array, allocating it, & then setting each of the 27 elements zero?
Thanks so much the help.
public class CharCount {
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          new CharCount().process();
     public void process() {
         // This declares an array of char and then assigns it a value.  The value comes from another one
         // of my secret programs.
         char[] countThese = Lab8.simple();
         printChars(countThese);
         for (int count =0; count < countThese.length; count++) {
          System.out.println(countThese[count]);
    // This method should print the characters in the array called print, one-by-one
    // Use a println ONLY after all the chars have been printed.
    public void printChars(char[] print) {
    public int charToInt(char ch) {
     if (ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z')
         return ch - 'A';
     else if (ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z')
         return ch - 'a';
     else return 26;
}

Answer 1

I take it the charToInt method was given to you. If you don't know what it does, it will give you a value from 0 to 26 depending on what char you pass as a parameter. So if you pass an 'a' or an 'A' it will return 0, 25 for 'z' or 'Z' and 26 for anything else. You use this value to access an array an increment the value (the number of times that letter has occured.
int value = charToInt('a');
arr[value]++;
System.out.println("Number of a's = " + arr[0]);