Program not counting all of the letters its suppose to be

[LetsG0Blue]

I'm writing a program that will count the number of occurrences of a certain letter. This is my code and my current output. The answer of the output is '8' while I'm only getting '7'. Does anybody see the problem? I can't use Arrays for this problem.

    public int letterCount(char c)
    {
    	int total = 0;
		for (int i=0; i< m_str.length(); i++)
		{
			if (Character.isUpperCase(m_str.charAt(i)))
				total++;
		}
		return total;
    }

Output:

Starting with: She Sells Sea Shells Down by the Sea Shore
Number of s's = 7

[jim829]

You are counting upper case letters, not occurrences of a specific letter.

There are a number of ways to approach the problem. But first you need to determine if this is a case-sensitive count or not.

Jim

[LetsG0Blue]

I don't want it to be case sensitive, but when I tried other methods it started returning the number of total letters in the sentence and not the number of s's

[jim829]

Okay. It will be case-insensitive. But notice that you are not comparing the supplied character to anything. Before coding you need to think of a strategy or general approach. Here is an example:

1. Get the character to count.
2. Compare this character to each character in the string.
3. If a match, increment count.

Now that is a reasonable start. However, in the general case, it will not work correctly. What happens if someone wants to count all the c's so they provide a C as an argument.

To test this you might want to put in strings of the same character but mix up the case and see what happens. And as always, put in print statements to help debug.

Regards,
Jim