Counting a certain character in a String (Java)

Question

String a="(Yeahhhh) I have finally made it to the (top)";

Given above String, there are 4 of '(' and ')' altogether.

My idea of counting that is by utilizing String.charAt method. However, this method is rather slow as I have to perform this counting for each string for at least 10000 times due to the nature of my project.

Anyone has any better idea or suggestion than using .chartAt method?????

Sorry for not explaining clearly earlier on, what I meant for the 10000 times is for the 10000 sentences to be analyzed which is the above String a as only one sentence.

Answer 1

StringUtils.countMatches(wholeString, searchedString) (from commons-lang)

searchedString may be one-char - "("

It (as noted in the comments) is calling charAt(..) multiple times. However, what is the complexity? Well, its O(n) - charAt(..) has complexity O(1), so I don't understand why do you find it slow.

Answer 2

Sounds like homework, so I'll try to keep it at the "nudge in the right direction".

What if you removed all characters NOT the character you are looking for, and look at the length of that string?

There is a String method that will help you with this.