2 Ways to find duplicate elements in an Array - Java

Problem: You have given an array of objects, which could be an array of integers and or array of Strings or any object which implements the Comparable interface. How would you find duplicate elements from an array? Can you solve this problem in O(n) complexity? This is actually one of the frequently asked coding problems from Java interviews. There are multiple ways to solve this problem and you will learn two popular ways here, first the brute force way, which involves comparing each element with every other element and other which uses a hash table like data structure to reduce the time complexity of problem from quadratic to linear, of course by trading off some space complexity. This also shows that how by using a suitable data structure you can come up with a better algorithm to solve a problem. If you are preparing for programming job interviews, then I also suggest you take a look at Cracking the Coding Interview book, which contains 150 programming questions and solutions, good enough to do well on any programming job interviews e.g. Java, C++, Python or Ruby.

How to Sort List into Ascending and Descending Order in Java

ArrayList, Set Sorting in Ascending – Descending Order Java

Sorting List, Set and ArrayList in Java on ascending and descending order is very easy, You just need to know correct API method to do that. Collections.sort()  method will sort the collection passed to it,  doesn't return anything just sort the collection itself.  Sort() method of Collections class in Java is overloaded where another version takes a Comparator and sort all the elements of Collection on order defined by Comparator.If we  don't pass any Comparator than object will be sorted based upon there natural order like String will be sorted alphabetically or lexicographically. Integer will be sorted numerically etc. Default sorting order for an object is ascending order like Integer will be sorted  from low to high while descending order is just opposite. Collections.reverseOrder() returns a Comparator which will be used for sorting Object in descending order.

Top 10 Tricky Java interview questions and Answers

What is a tricky question? Well, tricky Java interview questions are those questions which have some surprise element on it. If you try to answer a tricky question with common sense, you will most likely fail because they require some specific knowledge. Most of the tricky Java questions comes from confusing concepts like function overloading and overriding, Multi-threading which is really tricky to master, character encoding, checked vs unchecked exceptions and subtle Java programming details like Integer overflow. Most important thing to answer a tricky Java question is attitude and analytical thinking, which helps even if you don't know the answer. Anyway in this Java article we will see 10 Java questions which are real tricky and requires more than average knowledge of Java programming language to answer them correctly. As per my experience, there is always one or two tricky or tough Java interview question on any core Java or J2EE interviews, so it's good to prepare tricky questions from Java in advance.

How to Print Pyramid Pattern in Java? Program Example

Pattern based exercises are a good way to learn nested loops in Java. There are many pattern based exercises and one of them is printing Pyramid structure as shown below:

* 
* * 
* * * 
* * * * 
* * * * * 

You need to write a Java program to print above pyramid pattern. How many levels the pyramid triangle would have will be decided by the user input. You can print this kind of pattern by using print() and println() method from System.out object. System.out.print() just prints the String or character you passed to it, without adding a new line, useful to print stars in the same line. While, System.out.println() print characters followed by a newline character, which is useful to move to next line. You can also use Scanner class to get input from the user and draw pyramid up to that level only. For example in above diagram, the pyramid has 5 levels.

Java ArrayList Tutorial - The MEGA List

I have written several ArrayList tutorials, touching different ArrayList concepts and many how to do examples with ArrayList. In this tutorial, I am giving a summary of each of them. Why? So that any Java beginner who wants to learn ArrayList in detail, can go through the relevant tutorial and learn. It's also on request of many of my readers, who asked in past to share all the relevant tutorials in one place. Why should you learn ArrayList? Because it's the most important Collection class in Java. You will often find yourself using ArrayList and HashMap in tandem. It's your dynamic array which can resize itself as it grows. In another word, ArrayList is as much important as an array. When I started learning Java, my quest to ArrayList starts as a dynamic array, because there were many scenarios where we don't know the size of the array in advance. We end up either allocating less space or more space, both are not ideal. Btw, you should also check out Head First Java 2nd Edition if you are newbie and Effective Java 2nd Edition, if you know Java but wants to become a Java expert.

How to solve FizzBuzz in Java?

FizzBuzz is one of the most frequently asked questions on programming interviews and used to filter programmers who can't program. It looks extremely simple but it's tricky for those programmers or coder who struggle to structure their code. Fizzbuzz problem statement is very simple, write a program which return "fizz" if the number is a multiplier of 3, return "buzz" if its multiplier of 5 and return "fizzbuzz" if the number is divisible by both 3 and 5. If the number is not divisible by either 3 or 5 then it should just return the number itself. You can see nothing is fancy when it comes to thinking about the solution, but when you start coding, you will see a problem with structuring your code, particularly if else blocks.

How to convert float to int in Java? Examples

Even though both float and int are 32-bit wide data type, float has the higher range than integer primitive value. Since a float is a bigger than int, you can convert a float to an int by simply down-casting it e.g. (int) 4.0f will give you integer 4. By the way, you must remember that type casting just get rid of anything after the decimal point, they don't perform any rounding or flooring operation on the value. So if your float value is 3.999, down casting to an integer will produce 3, not 4. If you need rounding then consider using Math.round() method, which converts float to its nearest integer by adding +0.5 and then truncating it. Math.random() is overloaded for both float and double, so you can use this for converting double to long as well. Let's see an example of converting a float value to int in Java.

How to declare ArrayList with values in Java? Examples

Sometimes you want to create an ArrayList with values, just like you initialize t at the time of declaration, as shown below:

int[] primes = {2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17};
or
String[] names = {"john", "Johnny", "Tom", "Harry"};

but unfortunately, ArrayList doesn't support such kind of declaration in Java. But don't worry, there is a workaround  to declare an ArrayList with values e.g. String, integers, floats or doubles by using Arrays.asList() method, which is nothing but a shortcut to convert an Array to ArrayList.

Error: could not open 'C:\Java\jre8\lib\amd64\jvm.cfg'

A couple of weeks back I updated my laptop to Windows 10 but after trying for one day, I reverted back to Windows 8.1. Everything was alright until I open Eclipse, which was throwing "Error: could not open 'C:\Program Files\Java\jre8\lib\amd64\jvm.cfg', as soon as I launch it. It was quite bizarre because everything was fine earlier. I suspect Java installation problem, so I went to command prompt and typed Java, only to find the same error there as well. You can see below, I am just trying to run the "java" command from MS-DOS window. Here "java" command is picked from PATH environment variable.

Avoid ConcurrentModificationException while looping over Java ArrayList?

Apart from the NullPointerException and ClassNotFoundException, ConcurrentModificationException is another nightmare for Java developers. What makes this error tricky is the word concurrent, which always mislead Java programmers that this exception is coming because multiple threads are trying to modify the collection at the same time. Then begins the hunting, they spent countless hours to find the code which has the probability of concurrent modification. While in reality ConcurrentModficationException can also come on the single threaded environment. To give you an example, just loop over a list using for loop and try to remove one element, you will get the ConcurrentModificatoinExcetpion? Why? because you broke the rule of not modifying a Collection during iteration.

How to find highest repeating word from a text File in Java - Word Count Problem

How to find the word and their count from a text file is another frequently asked coding question from Java interviews. The logic to solve this problem is similar to what we have seen in how to find duplicate words in a String. In the first step you need to build a word Map by reading contents of a text File. This Map should contain word as a key and their count as value. Once you have this Map ready, you can simply sort the Map based upon values. If you don't know how to sort a Map on values, see this tutorial first. It will teach you by sorting HashMap on values. Now getting key and value in sorted should be easy, but remember HashMap doesn't maintain order, so you need to use a List to keep the entry in sorted order. Once you got this list, you can simply loop over the list and print each key and value from the entry. This way, you can also create a table of words and their count in decreasing order.  This problem is sometimes also asked as to print all word and their count in tabular format.