How to count the occurrences of an element in array – Java?

Write a program to count the occurrences of an element in an array is one of the basic question which will be asked in an Java Interview. After the introduction of Collection framework performing this operation is a pretty easy task. Let see how we can count the occurrence using HashMap.

Java Program to count the occurrences of an element in an array

package com.javainterviewpoint;

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

public class CountOccurence
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        //Input Array
        int[] input = new int[]{ 1,4,5,2,3,5,1,6,4,7,1,3,6,8,2,5};

        //countMap holds the count details of each element
        Map<Integer, Integer> countMap = new HashMap<Integer, Integer>();
        for (int i = 0; i < input.length; i++)
        {
            int key = input[i];
            if (countMap.containsKey(key))
            {
                int count = countMap.get(key);
                count++;
                countMap.put(key, count);
            } else
            {
                countMap.put(key, 1);
            }
        }
        
        //Printing the Element and its occurrence in the array
        for(Entry<Integer,Integer> val : countMap.entrySet())
        {
            System.out.println(val.getKey() + " occurs " + val.getValue() + " time(s)");
        }
    }
}

Output :

Count the occurrences of an element in an array in Java

We will be performing the below steps to count the occurrence.

• As a first step we will be creating a HashMap “countMap” to hold the element (Key) and the count as the value.
• For each of the element in the input array, check if it is present in the countMap, using containsKey() method.

 if (countMap.containsKey(key))

• If the element is present in the countMap, then increment the count flag by 1 and put the element as the Key and the count as the value to our countMap

count++;
countMap.put(key, count);

• If the element is not present then add the element as the key and 1 as the value

countMap.put(key, 1);

• Finally print the countMap, which will be containing the elements and its occurrences.