Getting letters from an array

Question

I have a program that sorts and counts the number of occurences that a letter appears in a story. The one issue I have is that I need to print the letter and the number of times it occurs while sorted.

if (line == null) break; //check for end of file before doing anything

line=line.toLowerCase();

for (int i = 0 ; i < line.length(); i++ ) {
    letter = line.charAt(i);
    int num = (int)letter;
    num-=96;

    if(num>=1 && num<=26) alpha[num]++;

}


for(int j=1; j<=26; j++) System.out.println((char)(j+64) +" = "+alpha[j]);

    int[] minArr = new int[6];
    int[] maxArr = new int[6];


    Arrays.sort(alpha);

    // System.out.print("There are "+max+" and "+min);
    for(int n=1;n<=5;n++) {
        System.out.println("is the highest with "+alpha[alpha.length-n]);
        System.out.println("is the lowest with "+alpha[n]);
        // int max = alpha.length-n;

        // System.out.println((char)(min+64)+" has the least number of letters"
    }

Is there a way I am able to get the sorted letters with their values?

Answer 1

Have you considered using a Map<String,Integer> to store you char-count pairs?

Something along the lines of:

SortedMap <String, Integer> alphaMap = new TreeMap<String, Integer>() {};

for (int i = 0 ; i < line.length(); i++ ) {
    String letter = String.valueOf(line.charAt(i));

    if (alphaMap.containsKey(letter)){
        alphaMap.get(letter)++;
    } else {
        alphaMap.put(letter, 0);
    }
}

You then have a map of your char-count pairs that is ordered by letter. You can then use this tree to find you max and min values.