Hi needing help

[sham1888]

I have been given a task of reading in a text file seperating the words in to a linked list then sorting them in to frequency of occurence.

I have got the reading of the file, creating the tokens and inserting them in to a linked list but I dont know where to start with regards to sorting them in to frequence of occurence.

any help would be very much appreciated

[redhead]

I know this answer isn't in strict Java, it's in pseudo C++, but that dosnt matter, its the theory in it that counts.

I would've made the linked list of some class of some sort ie:

class my_item{
  int count;
  string name;
  my_item * next;
  my_item *prev;
  public: my_item(string  n){name=n; count=1;};
  public: void increment(){count++;};
};

Then when I read a word from the input, see if it's in the list, if it is increment the counter at the appropriate point, else add it to the list.
Once done reading, just sort the linked list according to counter size.

[Belisarius]

What you can do is keep Hashtable using words as keys and the value as an Integer, incrementing it each time it's added. Then simply return the values as an array and call a sort using the Array object. Loop through the array and insert the items, in order, into a LinkedList.

A much more cool Java-esque way, however, would be to create a Comparable that contains the String an a count object, overriding equals(), and inserting it into a custom Set that will increment a counter in the Object that's not taken into account in the equals() method. Everytime a String is added to the Set, check to see if it exists, remove it from the Set it if does, increment the counter, and re-add it. The compareTo() would order first on count, then on the String. You could then simply dump it to a LinkedList.