How do I use the do-while loop statement?

There is also a do-while loop in the Java programming language. Instead of evaluating the expression at the beginning like the while loop does the do-while loop evaluates its expression at the end of the loop. Due to this the loop executes at least once during the program execution.

package org.kodejava.basic;

public class DoWhileDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int i = 0;

        // The do-while statement executes at least once because
        // the expression is checked at the end of the loop
        // process.
        do {
            // This block will be executed while `i` is smaller or
            // equals to 10.
            System.out.println(i);
            i++;
        } while (i <= 10);
    }
}

The program prints the following result:

0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

How do I use the while loop statement?

The code below demonstrate how to use the while loop statement. The while statement will check if its expression evaluates to true and execute the while statement block.

The program below will execute while the countDown value is bigger or equals to zero.

package org.kodejava.basic;

public class WhileDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Start the count-down from 10
        int countDown = 10;

        // Do the count-down process while the value of
        // countDown is bigger or equals to zero.
        while (countDown >= 0) {
            System.out.println(countDown);
            countDown--;

            try {
                // Adds one-second delay.
                Thread.sleep(1000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}

How do I use the switch statement?

The program below demonstrate how to use the switch statement. The switch statement can work with the byte, short, int and char primitive data types and the corresponding wrappers of these data type such as Byte, Short, Integer and Character. It also work with enumerated types, refer to the following example: How do I use enum in switch statement?.

The switch block or the body can contains one or more case or default labels. The switch statement evaluates its expression and evaluate the appropriate case.

You’ll also notice that after each case labels we have a break statement. This break statement causes the program execution to continue outside the switch block. Without using a break the case will fall-through to another case or default label.

package org.kodejava.basic;

import java.util.Scanner;

public class SwitchDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("The Planets");
        System.out.println("===================================");
        System.out.println("1. Mercury");
        System.out.println("2. Venus");
        System.out.println("3. Earth");
        System.out.println("4. Mars");
        System.out.println("5. Jupiter");
        System.out.println("6. Saturn");
        System.out.println("7. Uranus");
        System.out.println("8. Neptune");
        System.out.println();
        System.out.print("Please choose your favorite destination: ");

        Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);
        int destination = scanner.nextInt();

        System.out.print("Welcome to ");
        switch (destination) {
            case 1:
                System.out.println("Mercury");
                break;
            case 2:
                System.out.println("Venus");
                break;
            case 3:
                System.out.println("Earth");
                break;
            case 4:
                System.out.println("Mars");
                break;
            case 5:
                System.out.println("Jupiter");
                break;
            case 6:
                System.out.println("Saturn");
                break;
            case 7:
                System.out.println("Uranus");
                break;
            case 8:
                System.out.println("Neptune");
                break;
            default:
                System.out.println("Invalid Destination");
        }
    }
}

When you run the program you’ll have to following on the screen:

The Planets
===================================
1. Mercury
2. Venus
3. Earth
4. Mars
5. Jupiter
6. Saturn
7. Uranus
8. Neptune

Please choose your favorite destination: 3
Welcome to Earth

How do I use the if-then-else statement?

The if-then-else control flow statement adds a secondary path to the if statement when the expression evaluates to false. When it evaluates to false the else block will be executed.

Below is the program that takes input of user test score and evaluates the score to get the corresponding grade.

package org.kodejava.basic;

import java.io.Console;

public class IfThenElseDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.print("Please enter your score: ");

        try {
            // Get an instance of system console for taking user
            // input.
            Console console = System.console();

            // Take user score input and convert the input value into
            // number.
            int score = Integer.parseInt(console.readLine());

            String grade;
            if (score >= 90) {
                grade = "A";
            } else if (score >= 80) {
                grade = "B";
            } else if (score >= 60) {
                grade = "C";
            } else if (score >= 50) {
                grade = "D";
            } else {
                grade = "F";
            }

            System.out.println("Grade = " + grade);
        } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

When the program executed you’ll need to input the test score and the program will give you the grade.

Please enter your score: 75
Grade = C

How do I use the if-then statement?

The if-then is the most basic control flow statement. It will execute the block of statement only if the test expression evaluated equals to true. Let’s see the example below:

package org.kodejava.basic;

public class IfThenDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int a = 10;
        int b = 5;

        // If the evaluation of a > b is true, the if block will be
        // executed. In the block below we just print that the value
        // of "a" is bigger than "b".
        if (a > b) {
            System.out.printf("A(%d) is bigger than B(%d)%n", a, b);
        }

        // When we have only a single command inside a block we can
        // remove the opening and closing braces for the block ({..}).
        // But it is a good practice to always enclose the block with
        // braces, so that we know the block of code to be executed.
        if (b < a)
            System.out.printf("B(%d) is smaller that A(%d)%n", b, a);
    }
}

The result of the above program is:

A(10) is bigger than B(5)
B(5) is smaller that A(10)

How do I count the occurrences of a number in an array?

package org.kodejava.basic;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

public class NumberOccurrenceInArray {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int[] numbers = new int[]{1, 8, 3, 4, 3, 2, 5, 7, 3, 1, 4, 5, 6, 4, 3};

        Map<Integer, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();
        for (int key : numbers) {
            if (map.containsKey(key)) {
                int occurrence = map.get(key);
                occurrence++;
                map.put(key, occurrence);
            } else {
                map.put(key, 1);
            }
        }

        for (Integer key : map.keySet()) {
            int occurrence = map.get(key);
            System.out.println(key + " occur " + occurrence + " time(s).");
        }
    }
}

The result are:

1 occur 2 time(s).
2 occur 1 time(s).
3 occur 4 time(s).
4 occur 3 time(s).
5 occur 2 time(s).
6 occur 1 time(s).
7 occur 1 time(s).
8 occur 1 time(s).

How do I use the double brace initialization?

The double brace initialization {{ ... }} is another way for initializing a collection objects in Java. It is offer a simple syntax for initializing a collection object.

package org.kodejava.lang;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class DoubleBraceInitialization {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Creates a list of colors and add three colors of
        // Red, Green and Blue.
        List<String> colors1 = new ArrayList<>();
        colors1.add("Red");
        colors1.add("Green");
        colors1.add("Blue");

        for (String color : colors1) {
            System.out.println("Color = " + color);
        }

        // Creates another list of colors and add three colors
        // using the double brace initialization.
        List<String> colors2 = new ArrayList<>() {{
            add("Red");
            add("Green");
            add("Blue");
        }};

        for (String color : colors2) {
            System.out.println("Color = " + color);
        }
    }
}

What’s actually happened is: the first brace creates an anonymous inner class and the second brace is an initializer block. Due to the need for creating an inner class the use of double brace initialization is considered to be slower.

Because of this performance issue it’s better not to use this technique for your production code, but using it in your unit testing can make your test looks simpler.

How do I count the number of occurrences of a char in a String?

This example show you how to count the number of a character occurrences in a string. We show two ways to do it, using the String.replaceAll(String regex, String replace) method and creating a loop that check every char in the String and count the matched char.

package org.kodejava.lang;

public class CharCounter {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String text = "a,b,c,c,e,f,g,g,g,g,h";

        // Use the CharCounter.countCharOccurrences() method to count.
        int numberOfLetterC = CharCounter.countCharOccurrences(text, 'c');
        System.out.println("Letter c = " + numberOfLetterC);

        // Other solution is to use the String.replaceAll() method. We'll
        // replace the chars other than the counted char with an empty string.
        // To get the char occurrences we count the length of the remaining
        // string.
        int numberOfComma = text.replaceAll("[^,]", "").length();
        System.out.println("Comma    = " + numberOfComma);

        int numberOfLetterG = text.replaceAll("[^g]", "").length();
        System.out.println("Letter g = " + numberOfLetterG);
    }

    /**
     * Count number of specified char occurrences in the specified string.
     */
    private static int countCharOccurrences(String source, char target) {
        int counter = 0;

        // Loop through the string and increment the counter if the
        // target character found in the string. 
        for (int i = 0; i < source.length(); i++) {
            if (source.charAt(i) == target) {
                counter++;
            }
        }
        return counter;
    }
}

How do I get the content of an InputStream as a String?

We can use the code below to convert the content of an InputStream into a String. At first, we use FileInputStream create to a stream to a file that going to be read. IOUtils.toString(InputStream input, String encoding) method gets the content of the InputStream and returns a string representation of it.

package org.kodejava.commons.io;

import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;

import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;

public class InputStreamToString {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        // Create an input stream for reading data.txt file content.
        try (InputStream is = new FileInputStream("data.txt")) {
            // Get the content of an input stream as a string using UTF-8
            // as the character encoding.
            String contents = IOUtils.toString(is, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
            System.out.println(contents);
        }
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>commons-io</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
    <version>2.16.1</version>
</dependency>

Maven Central

How do I create a web based file upload?

This example using the Apache Commons FileUpload library to create a simple application for uploading files. The program is divided into two parts, a form using JSP and a servlet for handling the upload process. To run the sample you need to download the Commons FileUpload and Commons IO get the latest stable version.

Commons FileUpload Demo

Commons FileUpload Demo

The first step is to create the upload form. The form contains two fields for selecting file to be uploaded and a submit button. The form should have an enctype attribute and the value is multipart/form-data. We use a post method and the submit process is handled by the upload-servlet as defined in the action attribute.

<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" %>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <title>File Upload</title>
</head>

<body>
<h1>File Upload Form</h1>
<hr/>
<form action="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/upload-servlet"
      method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">

    <fieldset>
        <legend>Upload File</legend>
        <label for="filename_1">File: </label>
        <input id="filename_1" type="file" name="filename_1" size="50"/><br/>
        <label for="filename_2">File: </label>
        <input id="filename_2" type="file" name="filename_2" size="50"/><br/>
        <br/>
        <input type="submit" value="Upload File"/>
    </fieldset>

</form>
</body>
</html>

The second step is to create the servlet. The doPost method checks to see if the request contains a multipart content. After that we create a FileItemFactory, in this example we use the DiskFileItemFactory which is the default factory for FileItem. This factory creates an instance of FileItem and stored it either in memory or in a temporary file on disk depending on its content size.

The ServletFileUpload handles multiple files upload that we’ve specified in the form above sent using the multipart/form-data encoding type. The process of storing the data is determined by the FileItemFactory passed to the ServletFileUpload class.

The next steps is to parse the multipart/form-data stream by calling the ServletFileUpload.parseRequest(HttpServletRequest request) method. The parse process return a list of FileItem. After that we iterate on the list and check to see if FileItem representing an uploaded file or a simple form field. If it is represents an uploaded file we write the FileItem content to a file.

So here is the FileUploadDemoServlet.

package org.kodejava.commons.fileupload;

import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItem;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItemFactory;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.disk.DiskFileItemFactory;
import org.apache.commons.fileupload.servlet.ServletFileUpload;

import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Serial;
import java.util.List;

@WebServlet(urlPatterns = "/upload-servlet")
public class FileUploadDemoServlet extends HttpServlet {
    @Serial
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
            throws ServletException, IOException {
        boolean isMultipart = ServletFileUpload.isMultipartContent(request);

        if (isMultipart) {
            FileItemFactory factory = new DiskFileItemFactory();
            ServletFileUpload upload = new ServletFileUpload(factory);

            try {
                List<FileItem> items = upload.parseRequest(request);
                for (FileItem item : items) {
                    if (!item.isFormField()) {
                        String fileName = item.getName();

                        String root = getServletContext().getRealPath("/");
                        File path = new File(root + "/uploads");
                        if (!path.exists()) {
                            boolean status = path.mkdirs();
                        }

                        File uploadedFile = new File(path + "/" + fileName);
                        System.out.println(uploadedFile.getAbsolutePath());
                        item.write(uploadedFile);
                    }
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
        <version>4.0.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>commons-fileupload</groupId>
        <artifactId>commons-fileupload</artifactId>
        <version>1.5</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Maven Central Maven Central