indexOf to find all occurrences of a word in a String

Question

I'm trying to use indexOf to find all occurrences of the characters 'the' in a sentence. For example, if the sentence were "The other day I went over there", it should return 3.

I am able to do this up to the point where it finds the first index, but I'm unsure of how to write the loop. I originally had a for loop that searched the entire string, but it was returning the full string character length, instead of the occurrences of my specified character. How can I write a loop that will find all of the occurrences of the word? Thank you.

import java.util.Scanner;

public class TheFinder
{
    public static void main (String[] args)
    {
        String theString = "";
        Scanner enter = new Scanner(System.in);

        System.out.println("Please enter a sentence: ");
        theString = enter.nextLine();
        int counter2 = 0;
        theString.indexOf("the");

        if (theString.indexOf("the")!= -1)
        counter2++;



        System.out.printf("The characters 'the' were found %d times", counter2);
        System.out.println();

        System.out.println("This was programmed by -----");

Answer 1

You can keep track of the index:

int index = theString.indexOf("the");
while(index >= 0) {
    index = theString.indexOf("the", index+1);
    counter2++;
}

Answer 2

You have taken a complicated approach. Try this:

int count = str.split("the", -1).length - 1;

If you absolutely must use indexOf():

str = str.toLowerCase();
int count = 0;
for (int i = str.indexOf("the"); i >= 0; i = str.indexOf("the", i + 1))
    count++;