Hello everyone,
I'm on chapter 4 (Arrays and Strings) and I'm playing around a bit with what I know so far. I made a program to return all the repeated words in a text and the number of times that these words were repeated. I got the program working now.

I thought of an easier way of doing it with a different method. Rather than having to use all the indexes, loops and messy code I wrote maybe I could intern() all the strings in the array containing the split()ted text and then find out whether a String is referenced by more than one variable and if so how many times. Is this possible? Can you count how many variables are referencing an object (String in this case)?

I'm starting programming so I don't know any of the Array classes utilities, lists, etc that are on the book further on. So code using those won't be very helpful.

Thank you.

Hey, no you can't do that AFAIK. Each string in your array is a seperate object, rather than a reference to an object. So if I have the word "house" three times, that means I have three strings not three pointers to the same string.

The nicest way to solve this problem involves you using a hash table with the split() strings as its keys. But I won't confuse you with that now.

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Charlie Harvey's website - linux, perl, java, anarchism and punk rock: http://charlieharvey.org.uk

I'll keep that in mind for when I know a
bit more of programming.
Thanks Charlie.

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This is not true. If you have three String and all of them have the word "house", java only keeps one instance of "house", and all three objects reference the same instance.

Actually this is the same in C#.

But you are right, what the OP suggested is not doable.