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

How do I count number of weekday between two dates?

The code below helps you find the number of a specified weekday (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.) between two dates. The solution we used below is to loop between the two dates and check if the weekday of those dates are equals to the day we want to count.

package org.kodejava.util;

import java.util.Calendar;

public class DaysBetweenDate {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Calendar start = Calendar.getInstance();
        start.set(2021, Calendar.OCTOBER, 1);
        Calendar end = Calendar.getInstance();
        end.set(2021, Calendar.OCTOBER, 31);

        System.out.print("Number Monday between " +
                start.getTime() + " and " + end.getTime() + " are: ");

        int numberOfDays = 0;
        while (start.before(end)) {
            if (start.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) == Calendar.MONDAY) {
                numberOfDays++;
                start.add(Calendar.DATE, 7);
            } else {
                start.add(Calendar.DATE, 1);
            }
        }

        System.out.println(numberOfDays);
    }
}

The result of our program is:

Number Monday between Fri Oct 01 07:55:06 CST 2021 and Sun Oct 31 07:55:06 CST 2021 are: 4

How do I set Swing Timer initial delay?

The Swing javax.swing.Timer object fires the action event after the delay time specified in the constructor passed. For some reasons you might want the Timer class fires immediately after it was started.

To achieve this you can set the timer initial delay by calling the setInitialDelay(int initialDelay) method. The example below give you an example how to do it.

package org.kodejava.swing;

import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;

public class TimerInitialDelayDemo extends JFrame {
    private final JLabel counterLabel = new JLabel();

    private Timer timer = null;

    public TimerInitialDelayDemo() throws HeadlessException {
        initUI();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(
                () -> new TimerInitialDelayDemo().setVisible(true));
    }

    private void initUI() {
        setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        setSize(500, 500);

        Container container = getContentPane();
        container.setLayout(new FlowLayout(FlowLayout.CENTER));
        container.add(counterLabel);

        timer = new Timer(1000, new MyActionListener());

        // Set initial delay of the Timer object. Setting initial delay
        // to zero causes the timer fires the event immediately after
        // it is started.
        timer.setInitialDelay(0);
        timer.start();
    }

    class MyActionListener implements ActionListener {
        private int counter = 10;

        public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
            counter = counter - 1;
            String text = "<html><font size='14'>" +
                    counter +
                    "</font></head>";
            counterLabel.setText(text);
            if (counter == 0) {
                timer.stop();
            }
        }
    }
}