I'm having Trouble with a Simple Histogram

Question

The program as a whole is supposed to read a text file, count the number of words, and ouput it. For example, "The The The pineapple pineapple" should ouput "The 3, Pineapple 2" I've gotten as far as dumping the tokens into an array and creating 2 empty arrays of the same size(word, count), but I don't know how to do the double loop that's necessory for the count. Please see my "hist()" method, this is where I'm having trouble. Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated. import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
/*class Entry {
    String word;
    int count;
class main { 
    public static void main(String[] args){
     main h = new main();
     h.menu();
    String [] wrd;
    String [] words;
    int[] count;
    int wordcount = 0;
    int foundit = -1;
    int size;
    int numword = 0;
    int i = 0;
    int j = 0;
    int elements = 0;
    public void menu() {
      System.out.println("Welcome to Histogram 1.0");
      BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
      while(true){
          System.out.println("Please enter one of the following commands: open, hist, show, save, help, or quit");
          String s = null;
          try {s = in.readLine();} catch (IOException e) {}
          if (s.equals("open")) open();
          else if (s.equals("hist")) hist();
          else if (s.equals("show")) show();
          else if (s.equals("save")) save();
          else if (s.equals("help")) help();
          else if (s.equals("quit")) {
              System.exit(0);
     public void open(){
     // prompt user for name of file and open it
     System.out.println("Enter Name Of File: ");
     BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader (System.in));
     String filename = null;
     try{ filename = in.readLine();}
     catch(IOException e)  {}
     BufferedReader fin = null;
     try { fin = new BufferedReader (new FileReader(filename));}
     catch (FileNotFoundException e){
         System.out.println("Can't open file "+filename+" for reading, please try again.");
         return;
     // read file for 1st time to count the tokens
     String line = null;
     try{ line = fin.readLine();}
     catch(IOException e) {}
     StringTokenizer tk = new StringTokenizer(line);
     while(line!= null){
         try{ line = fin.readLine();}
         catch(IOException e) {}
         //tk = new StringTokenizer(line);
         wordcount += tk.countTokens();
         System.out.println("wordcount = " + wordcount);
     // close file
     try{fin.close();}
     catch(IOException e){
         System.out.println( filename+" close failed");
     // now go through file a second time and copy tokens into the new array
     wrd = new String [wordcount];
        BufferedReader fin2 = null;
        try{ fin2 = new BufferedReader (new FileReader(filename));}
        catch(FileNotFoundException e){
            System.out.println("Can't open file "+filename+" for reading, please try again.");
            return;
        String pop = null;
        try{ pop = fin2.readLine();}
        catch(IOException e) {}
        StringTokenizer tk2 = new StringTokenizer(pop);
     int nextindex = 0;
     while(pop!=null){
         while (tk2.hasMoreTokens()) {
          wrd[nextindex] = tk2.nextToken();
          nextindex++;
         try{ pop = fin2.readLine();}
         catch(IOException e) {}
         //tk2 = new StringTokenizer(pop);
     try{fin2.close();}
     catch(IOException e){
         System.out.println(filename+" close failed");
     for(int k=0;  k<wordcount; k++){
        System.out.println(wrd[k]);
    public void hist() {
        //prints out all the tokens
       words = new String[wordcount];
       count = new int[wordcount];
       //boolean test = false;
           for(int m=0; m<wordcount; m++){
               if(words.equals(wrd[m])){
                   System.out.print("match");        
               else{
                   words[m] = wrd[m];
                   count[m] = 1;
    public void show() {
     //shows all the tokens
     for(int j=0; j<wordcount; j++){
          System.out.print(words[j]);
          System.out.print(count[j]);
    public void save() {
        //Write the contents of the entire current histogram to a text file
        PrintWriter out = null;
        try { out = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter("outfile.txt"));}
        catch(IOException e) {}
        for (int i= 0; i<wordcount; i++) {
            out.println(words);
out.println(count[i]);
out.close();
public void help() {
System.out.println(" This help will tell you what each command will do.");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" open - this command will open a text file that must be in the same directory ");
System.out.println(" as the program and scan through it counting how many words it has, ");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" hist - after you use the open command to open the text file the hist command will ");
System.out.println(" make a tally sheet counting how many times each word has been used. ");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" show - after you have opened the file with the open command and created a histogram ");
System.out.println(" with the hist command the show command will show a portion of or the entire h histogram. ");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" (show) just by itself will show the entire histogram. ");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" (show abc) will show the histogram count for the text abc if it exists. ");
System.out.println(" If the text is not found it will display text not found. ");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" (show pr*) will show the histogram count for all text items that begin with ");
System.out.println(" the letters pr, using * as a wild card character. ");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" save - after you have opened the file with the open command, and created the histogram ");
System.out.println(" with the hist command the save command will save the contents of the entire current histogram. ");
System.out.println(" to a text file that you choose the name of. If the file already exists the user will be prompted ");
System.out.println(" for confirmation on if they want to pick another name or overwrite the file.");
System.out.println("");
System.out.println(" quit - will quit the program. " );

Answer 1

Couple of points to begin with:
1. Class names should begin with an upper case letter
2. Class names should be descriptive
3. You shouldn't call your class main (this kind of follows from the first two points).
4. Always use {} around blocks of code, it will make your life, and those of the people who have to eventually maintain your code a lot easier.
5. Never ignore exceptions, i.e. don't use an empty block to catch exceptions.
6. Avoid assiging a local variable to null, especially if the only reason you are doing it is to "fix" a compilation error.
7. Your method names should reflect everything that the method does, this should encourage you to break the application logic down into the smallest tasks possible (a general rule is that each method should do one task, and do it well). In the example below, I ignore this advice in the loadFile() method, but it's left as an exercise to you to fix this.
8. You should use descriptive variable names (fin may make sense now, but will it in 6 months time?), and use camel case where the name uses multiple words, e.g. wordcount should be wordCount
On the problem at hand, I'll post a cut down example of what you want, and you can look at the javadocs, and find out how it works.
This code uses the auto-boxing feature of 1.5 (even though I don't like it, again it's left as an exercise for you to remove the auto-boxing ;) ) and some generics (you should be able to work out how to use this code in 1.4).
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;
public class Histogram {
    /** Map to box the words. */
    private Map<String, Integer> wordMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
     * Main method.
     * @param args
     *        Array of command line arguments
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Histogram h = new Histogram();
        h.menu();
     * Display the menu, and enter program loop.
    public void menu() {
        System.out.println("Welcome to Histogram 1.0");
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
        while (true) {
            System.out.println("Please enter one of the following commands: open, hist, show, save, help, or quit");
            String s = null;
            try {
                s = in.readLine();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                System.out.println("Unable to interpret the input.");
                continue;
            if (s.equals("open")) {
                loadFile();
            } else if (s.equals("quit")) {
                System.exit(0);
     * Ask the user for a file name and load it
    public void loadFile() {
        System.out.println("Enter Name Of File: ");
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
        String filename = null;
        try {
            filename = reader.readLine();
            reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
            loadWords(reader);
            reader.close();
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            System.out.println("Can't open file " + filename + " for reading, please try again.");
            return;
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.out.println(filename + " close failed");
        displayHistogram();
     * Load the words from the file into the map.
     * @param reader
    private void loadWords(BufferedReader reader) {
        int wordCount = 0;
        try {
            String line = reader.readLine();
            while (line != null) {
                StringTokenizer tk = new StringTokenizer(line);
                wordCount += tk.countTokens();
                while (tk.hasMoreTokens()) {
                    String next = tk.nextToken();
                    if (wordMap.containsKey(next)) {
                        wordMap.put(next, (wordMap.get(next).intValue() + 1));
                    } else {
                        wordMap.put(next, 1);
                System.out.println("line: " + line + " word count = " + wordCount);
                line = reader.readLine();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.out.println("Unable to read next line");
     * Display the words and their count.
    private void displayHistogram() {
        System.out.println("Map of words: " + wordMap);
}