Checking a String against another String

thunderball

Hi all,

I am looking to load a text file and search for a specific word and the number of times it appears. The following code produces a list of all the individual words, however when I try to run an if statement for a specific word, it returns nothing even when the word is present in the list.

String[] lines = loadStrings("2012_0806.txt");
int wordCount = 0;
String[] words;

String searchTerm = "risk";

for (int i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
  String separators = WHITESPACE + ",;.:?()\"-";
  words = splitTokens(lines[i], separators);
  wordCount += words.length;

  for (int j = 0; j < words.length; j++) {
    String word = words[j].toLowerCase();
   // println(word); // this prints all the individual words -- "risk" is on here 3 times
    if (word == "risk") {
      println("success");
    }
  }
}

KevinWorkman

You should never use == when comparing Strings. Always use the equals() method instead. Do a google search of "Java String equality" for more info.

thunderball

Thanks for the information, that solved my issue.

KevinWorkman

Also, I have no idea what you're doing, but you might consider looking at the ArrayList.contains() method as well as the String.equalsIgnoreCase() method.

thunderball

Thanks, my goal is just search through a text file and count the number of times a specific word appears.

KevinWorkman

Sounds good. There are a ton of different ways to do that (depending on if you only care about one word, or want the word counts of every word, or the most popular word, etc). Data structures like ArrayList and Map can help you, but if you only care about a single word, then they might be overkill. Good luck!

thunderball

Thanks again!