Help me with strings

[Liza Misra]

I want to check for the number of occurences of a particular character in a string ignoring case.
Is it possible to use equalsIgnoreCase(),meant for strings?
I tried something like:
word1.charAt(index).equalsIgnoreCase('a')
but it gives error (char can not be dereferenced).
Please comment.
Liza

[Joseph Russell]

I'll answer your question but to restate what Marylin already said in your thread about interfaces this question doesn't have anything to do with the Cattle Drive assignments. It would be better for you to put them in Java In General( beginner ).
This might be a little sloppy but it works. I'd appreciate some suggestions as to how to make it look better.

public class IterateString
{
    public static int getCount( char c , String s )
    {
        int count = 0;
        c = Character.toLowerCase( c );
        Character key = new Character( c );
        
        for( int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++ )
        {
            char test = Character.toLowerCase( s.charAt( i ) );
            Character compareTest = new Character( test );
            if( key.compareTo( compareTest ) == 0 )
            { 
                count++;
            }
        }
        return count;
    }
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        String howMany = "The itsy, bitsy, spider";
        System.out.println( getCount( 'I' , howMany ) );
        System.out.println( getCount( 'r' , "Joseph Russell" ) );
    }
}

Maybe this should be moved to Java in General? Let me know if it does get moved.
Thanks,
Joe
[This message has been edited by Joseph Russell (edited March 27, 2001).]

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

equalsIgnoreCase() compares two Strings ignoring case differences in the two Strings.
But, you could do something like this:

public class Test
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        String s = "a Big black cAt" ;
        int sum = 0 ;
        
        System.out.println( s );
        
        for ( int i = 0 ; i < s.length() ; i++ )
        {
            if ( s.toLowerCase().charAt( i ) == 'a' )
            {
                sum++ ;
            }
        }
        System.out.println( sum );
    }
    
}

I'm moving this to Java in General (Beginners)