Develop Reference

Check for double letters with indexOf?

I need to check if there are more than one of the same letters in a word.
For example, in the name 'bob' the index of 'b' is '0 and 2' but indexOf only creates a sees the first index of 0.
What I need is for it to check and then skip over 0 and go further down the work and check for more of the same letters. Here is what I have so far.
String wordNow = "bob";
letterGuess = console.next().toUpperCase();
letterIndex = wordNow.indexOf(letterGuess);
System.out.println(letterIndex);
OUTPUT: 0
If anyone has a good efficient way of doing this, i'm all ears.

You can use String.lastIndexOf for this. Since both functions will return -1 if not found, then to check if there is more than one instance, you can just compare the values
return wordNow.indexOf(letterGuess) != wordNow.lastIndexOf(letterGuess);

There are multiple versions of the method indexOf. One of them takes an index itself! Just read the javadoc for the string class carefully. You see there is even one called "lastIndexOf" which would come in really handy.
You can use that for example to see if there are other occurrences of that char "behind" the first index you found.
In any case: the real answer here is that you should study the documentation of classes extensively.

You can use a substring by excluding the matching character, as below:
String wordNow = "bob";
letterGuess = console.next().toUpperCase();
letterIndex = wordNow.indexOf(letterGuess);
System.out.println(letterIndex);
if(letterIndex >= 0) {
int secondIndex = wordNow.subString(letterIndex+1).indexOf(letterGuess);
System.out.println(secondIndex);
}

The most efficient way is to simply just search for the element you are looking for (assuming no order or distribution over the input string).
public boolean isCharacterRepeatedIgnoreCase(String inputString, Character c) {
int numFound = 0;
final Character chUpper = Character.toUpperCase(c);
final String upperCaseString = inputString.toUpperCase();
for (int i=0;i<upperCaseString.length();++i) {
if (upperCaseString.charAt(i) == chUpper) {
numFound++;
}
if (numFound > 1) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
Note, I have not run the above code. So please write proper unit tests if you plan on considering the above. Also, I have assumed that your character can fit into 16 bits. You probably want to do something around String or toUpperCase(int) to handle Unicode, see Oracle.

Using unary representation with addition java string

I need to write a code that takes a string input and turns it, or something to that effect, into a valid unary equation with addition to verify if it is valid. I'm confused, could anyone point me in the direction of understanding this?
An example would be:
111+1111=11111+1+1 is the statement 3+4=5+1+1 which is valid.
My other question would be how to use stacks to do unary operations.

If you are limited to this language then your can write a simple parser using a number of methods. You can first split your String
String[] parts = eqn.split("=");
Then split each part:
String[] left = parts[0].split("\\+");
String[] right = parts[1].split("\\+");
Now you can simply count the lengths of the strings:
int leftside = 0;
for (String l : left) {
leftside += l.length;
}
and so on for the right side and see if they are equal.
There are many other ways you can tackle this.
Basically you have to write a parser. You might want to use a character-by-character scanner, or use regexes or a generic tool such as ANTLR. It depends on your final goal and whether it is likely to change. Are you likely to have characters other than 1, +, =, for example?
My guess is this is homework. And I guess that you are expected to read character-by-character and push() each character on a stack. Then you have to pop() the stack when you encounter certain conditions.I'm not going to do this for you...

Another possible solution.
String input = "111+1111=11111+1+1";
String[] parts = input.split("=");
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("1");
Matcher matcherLeft = pattern.matcher(parts[0]);
Matcher matcherRight = pattern.matcher(parts[1]);
int leftTotal = 0;
while (matcherLeft.find())
leftTotal++;
int rightTotal = 0;
while (matcherRight.find())
rightTotal++;
if(leftTotal == rightTotal)
System.out.println("Valid");
else
System.out.println("Invalid");
Starts out by splitting the string in to the left and right side of the equations. Then simply counts the number of 1's in each part and does a comparison. There's definitely better ways to do this, but with this example it's pretty easy to see what is going on.

Efficient way to search for a set of strings in a string in Java

I have a set of elements of size about 100-200. Let a sample element be X.
Each of the elements is a set of strings (number of strings in such a set is between 1 and 4). X = {s1, s2, s3}
For a given input string (about 100 characters), say P, I want to test whether any of the X is present in the string.
X is present in P iff for all s belong to X, s is a substring of P.
The set of elements is available for pre-processing.
I want this to be as fast as possible within Java. Possible approaches which do not fit my requirements:
Checking whether all the strings s are substring of P seems like a costly operation
Because s can be any substring of P (not necessarily a word), I cannot use a hash of words
I cannot directly use regex as s1, s2, s3 can be present in any order and all of the strings need to be present as substring
Right now my approach is to construct a huge regex out of each X with all possible permutations of the order of strings. Because number of elements in X <= 4, this is still feasible. It would be great if somebody can point me to a better (faster/more elegant) approach for the same.
Please note that the set of elements is available for pre-processing and I want the solution in java.

You can use regex directly:
Pattern regex = Pattern.compile(
"^ # Anchor search to start of string\n" +
"(?=.*s1) # Check if string contains s1\n" +
"(?=.*s2) # Check if string contains s2\n" +
"(?=.*s3) # Check if string contains s3",
Pattern.DOTALL | Pattern.COMMENTS);
Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
foundMatch = regexMatcher.find();
foundMatch is true if all three substrings are present in the string.
Note that you might need to escape your "needle strings" if they could contain regex metacharacters.

It sounds like you're prematurely optimising your code before you've actually discovered a particular approach is actually too slow.
The nice property about your set of strings is that the string must contain all elements of X as a substring -- meaning we can fail fast if we find one element of X that is not contained within P. This might turn out a better time saving approach than others, especially if the elements of X are typically longer than a few characters and contain no or only a few repeating characters. For instance, a regex engine need only check 20 characters in 100 length string when checking for the presence of a 5 length string with non-repeating characters (eg. coast). And since X has 100-200 elements you really, really want to fail fast if you can.
My suggestion would be to sort the strings in order of length and check for each string in turn, stopping early if one string is not found.

Looks like a perfect case for the Rabin–Karp algorithm:
Rabin–Karp is inferior for single pattern searching to Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm, Boyer–Moore string search algorithm and other faster single pattern string searching algorithms because of its slow worst case behavior. However, Rabin–Karp is an algorithm of choice for multiple pattern search.

When the preprocessing time doesn't matter, you could create a hash table which maps every one-letter, two-letter, three-letter etc. combination which occurs in at least one string to a list of strings in which it occurs.
The algorithm to index a string would look like that (untested):
HashMap<String, Set<String>> indexes = new HashMap<String, Set<String>>();
for (int pos = 0; pos < string.length(); pos++) {
for (int sublen=0; sublen < string.length-pos; sublen++) {
String substring = string.substr(pos, sublen);
Set<String> stringsForThisKey = indexes.get(substring);
if (stringsForThisKey == null) {
stringsForThisKey = new HashSet<String>();
indexes.put(substring, stringsForThisKey);
}
stringsForThisKey.add(string);
}
}
Indexing each string that way would be quadratic to the length of the string, but it only needs to be done once for each string.
But the result would be constant-speed access to the list of strings in which a specific string occurs.

You are probably looking for Aho-Corasick algorithm, which constructs an automata (trie-like) from the set of strings (dictionary), and try to match the input string to the dictionary using this automata.

You might want to consider using a "Suffix Tree" as well. I haven't used this code, but there is one described here
I have used proprietary implementations (that I no longer even have access to) and they are very fast.

One way is to generate every possible substring and add this to a set. This is pretty inefficient.
Instead you can create all the strings from any point to the end into a NavigableSet and search for the closest match. If the closest match starts with the string you are looking for, you have a substring match.
static class SubstringMatcher {
final NavigableSet<String> set = new TreeSet<String>();
SubstringMatcher(Set<String> strings) {
for (String string : strings) {
for (int i = 0; i < string.length(); i++)
set.add(string.substring(i));
}
// remove duplicates.
String last = "";
for (String string : set.toArray(new String[set.size()])) {
if (string.startsWith(last))
set.remove(last);
last = string;
}
}
public boolean findIn(String s) {
String s1 = set.ceiling(s);
return s1 != null && s1.startsWith(s);
}
}
public static void main(String... args) {
Set<String> strings = new HashSet<String>();
strings.add("hello");
strings.add("there");
strings.add("old");
strings.add("world");
SubstringMatcher sm = new SubstringMatcher(strings);
System.out.println(sm.set);
for (String s : "ell,he,ow,lol".split(","))
System.out.println(s + ": " + sm.findIn(s));
}
prints
[d, ello, ere, hello, here, ld, llo, lo, old, orld, re, rld, there, world]
ell: true
he: true
ow: false
lol: false

Matching Subset in a String

Let's say I have-
String x = "ab";
String y = "xypa";
If I want to see if any subset of x exists in y, what would be the fastest way? Looping is time consuming. In the example above a subset of x is "a" which is found in y.

The answer really depends on many things.
If you just want to find any subset and you're doing this only once, looping is just fine (and the best you can do without using additional storage) and you can stop when you find a single character that matches.
If you have a fixed x and want to use it for matching several strings y, you can do some pre-processing to store the characters in x in a table and use this table to check if each character of y occurs in x or not.
If you want to find the largest subset, then you're looking at a different problem: the longest common subsequence problem.

Well, I'm not sure it's better than looping, but you could use String#matches:
if (y.matches(".*[" + x + "]+.*")) ...
You'd need to escape characters that are special in a regex [] construct, though (like ], -, \, ...).
The above is just an example, if you're doing it more than once, you'll want to use Pattern, Matcher, and the other stuff from the java.util.regex package.

You have to use for loop or use regex which is just as expensive as a for loop, becasue you need to convert one of your strings into chars basically.
Boolean isSubset = false;
for(int i = 0; i < x.length(); i++) {
if(y.contains(x.charAt(i))) {
isSubset = true;
break;
}
}
using a for loop.

It looks like this could be a case of the longest common substring problem.

You can generate all subsets of x (e.g. , in your example, ab, a, b) and then generate a regexp that would do the
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(ab|a|b)");
Matcher m = p.matcher(y);
if(m.find()) {
System.err.println(m.group());
}

If both Strings will only contain [a-z]. Then fastest would be to make two bitmaps, 26 bits longs. Mark all the bits contained in the String. Take the AND of the bitmaps, the resulting bits are present in both Strings, the largest common subset. This would be a simple O(n) with n the length of the biggest String.
(If you want to cover the whole lot of UTF, bloom filters might be more appropriate. )

Looping is time-consuming, but there's no way to do what you want other than going over the target string repeatedly.
What you can do is optimize by checking the smallest strings first, and work your way up. For example, if the target string doesn't contain abc, it can't possibly contain abcdef.
Other optimizations off the top of my head:
Don't continue to check for a match after a non-matching character is hit, though in Java you can let the computer worry about this.
Don't check to see if something is a match if there aren't enough characters left in the target string for a match to be possible.
If you need speed and have lots of space, you might be able to break the target string up into a fancy data structure like a trie for better results, though I don't have an exact algorithm in mind.
Another storage-is-not-a-problem solution: decompose the target into every possible substring and store the results in a HashSet.

What about this:?
package so3935620;
import static org.junit.Assert.*;
import java.util.BitSet;
import org.junit.Test;
public class Main {
public static boolean overlap(String s1, String s2) {
BitSet bs = new BitSet();
for (int i = 0; i < s1.length(); i++) {
bs.set(s1.charAt(i));
}
for (int i = 0; i < s2.length(); i++) {
if (bs.get(s2.charAt(i))) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
#Test
public void test() {
assertFalse(overlap("", ""));
assertTrue(overlap("a", "a"));
assertFalse(overlap("abcdefg", "ABCDEFG"));
}
}
And if that version is too slow, you can compute the BitSet depending on s1, save that in some variable and later only loop over s2.

How to validate phone number(US format) in Java?

I just want to know where am i wrong here:
import java.io.*;
class Tokens{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
//String[] result = "this is a test".split("");
String[] result = "4543 6546 6556".split("");
boolean flag= true;
String num[] = {"0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9"};
String specialChars[] = {"-","#","#","*"," "};
for (int x=1; x<result.length; x++)
{
for (int y=0; y<num.length; y++)
{
if ((result[x].equals(num[y])))
{
flag = false;
continue;
}
else
{
flag = true;
}
if (flag == true)
break;
}
if (flag == false)
break;
}
System.out.println(flag);
}
}

If this is not homework, is there a reason you're avoiding regular expressions?
Here are some useful ones: http://regexlib.com/DisplayPatterns.aspx?cattabindex=6&categoryId=7
More generally, your code doesn't seem to validate that you have a phone number, it seems to merely validate that your strings consists only of digits. You're also not allowing any special characters right now.

Asides from the regex suggestion (which is a good one), it would seem to make more sense to deal with arrays of characters rather than single-char Strings.
In particular, the split("") call (shudder) could/should be replaced by toCharArray(). This lets you iterate over each individual character, which more clearly indicates your intent, is less prone to bugs as you know you're treating each character at once, and is more efficient*. Likewise your valid character sets should also be characters.
Your logic is pretty strangely expressed; you're not even referencing the specialChars set at all, and the looping logic once you've found a match seems odd. I think this is your bug; the matching seems to be the wrong way round in that if the character matches the first valid char, you set flag to false and continue round the current loop; so it will definitely not match the next valid char and hence you break out of the loop with a true flag. Always.
I would have thought something like this would be more intuitive:
private static final Set<Character> VALID_CHARS = ...;
public boolean isValidPhoneNumber(String number)
{
for (char c : number,toCharArray())
{
if (!VALID_CHARS.contains(c))
{
return false;
}
}
// All characters were valid
return true;
}
This doesn't take sequences into account (e.g. the strings "--------** " and "1" would be valid because all individual characters are valid) but then neither does your original code. A regex is better because it lets you specify the pattern, I supply the above snippet as an example of a clearer way of iterating through the characters.
*Yes, premature optimization is the root of all evil, but when better, cleaner code also happens to be faster that's an extra win for free.

Maybe this is overkill, but with a grammar similar to:
<phone_numer> := <area_code><space>*<local_code><space>*<number> |
<area_code><space>*"-"<space>*<local_code><space>*"-"<space>*<number>
<area_code> := <digit><digit><digit> |
"("<digit><digit><digit>")"
<local_code> := <digit><digit><digit>
<number> := <digit><digit><digit><digit>
you can write a recursive descent parser. See this page for an example.

You can checkout the Pattern class in Java, really easy to work with regular expression using this class:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html.