Urgent help! question about list.toStirng()?

Question

currently, i am working on a word counter programe, i stored each word and it's corresponding occurrence in a linkedlist. now i need to sort the list in the decreasing order of occurrence.
and the output would look like this:
not 2
a 2
i 1
am 1
girl 1
yet 1
woman 1
but the output so far i got looks like the following:
[not   2, a   2, i   1, am   1, girl   1, yet   1, woman   1]
and i know it becasue i uesed the "list.toString()"method. the question is how can i convert this format to the previous one or i could reach it in someway else?would anyone give me some tips?
the following code is i used for sorting:
public String results() //Compare the occurrences of  every two words in the list and reorder each node of
  {                       //the list in decreasing order of it's corresponding occurrence
       String str = "";
       ListIterator iter = list.listIterator();
       int length = list.size();
       int i,j;
       int count1, count2;
       WordNode temp1, temp2;
      for(i = 0; i < length-1; i++)
            for(j = i + 1; j<length; j++)
               temp1 = (WordNode)list.get(i);
               temp2 = (WordNode)list.get(j);
               count1 = temp1.getCount();
               count2 = temp2.getCount();
               if(count1 < count2)
                    list.remove(i);
                    list.add(i,temp2);
                    list.remove(j);
                    list.add(j,temp1);
      str = list.toString(); //Call the toSting() method in WordNode class to get each word and it's occurrence
      return str;
  }much appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi there,
The problem you have here is that you are not separating the distinct phases of your program. These are:
- build the sorted list
- print report
Thus, if I had to write the code below, I would change your results by two methods:
List sortedResult = sortWords();
printReport(sortedResult);
My sortWords() would be your results(), except that I would return list at the end, not list.toString().
Then, I would have all the flexibility in the world inside my printReport( List ) method. As a start, it would probably look like this:
public void printReport(List aList) {
  Iterator iter = list.iterator();
  while(iter.hasNext()) {
    System.out.println(iter.next());
}Regards,
Manuel Amago.