I wrote this program to check the number of times that each letter appears in a string input by the user. It works fine, but is there a more efficient or alternative solution of going about this task than reiterating through a twenty-six-element-long array for every single character?

import java.util.Scanner;

public class Letters {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        @SuppressWarnings("resource")

        Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);

        char[] c = {'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z'};

        int[] f = {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0};

        System.out.println("Enter a string.");

        String k = sc.nextLine();

        String s = k.toUpperCase();

        s = s.trim();

        int l = s.length();

        System.out.println("Checking string = " + s);

        char ch;

        for (int i = 0; i < l; i++) {

            ch = s.charAt(i);

            for (int j = 0; j < c.length; j++) {

                if (ch == c[j]) {

                    f[j]++;

                }

            }

        }

        System.out.println("ChartFreq");

        for (int i = 0; i < c.length; i++) {

            if (f[i] != 0) {

               System.out.println(c[i] + "t" + f[i]);

            }

        }

    }

}

Separate logical elements

It's good to separate different logical parts of a program, for example:

• Parse input: a function that takes an InputStream and returns a String
  


• Compute frequencies: a function that takes a String and returns frequencies in some form. In your current program you used an int[], it could have been a Map<Character, Integer>.


• Print the frequencies: a function that takes the frequencies in some form, returns nothing, and prints to screen the frequencies nicely formatted.

Computing indexes of letters

If the input string contains only uppercase letters, then you can translate those letters to array indexes in the range of 0 to 25 (inclusive) like this:

int index = ch - 'A';

This eliminates the nested loop you had.
It also eliminates the need for the c array.

Initializing arrays

Instead of this:

int[] f = {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0};

You could write simply int[] f = new int[26];

Instead of this:

char[] c = {'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z'};

I would take a lazy approach and write char[] c = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ".toCharArray();

Use better variable names

Single-letter variable names should only be used for trivial, highly transient things.
The names f and c in the program are inappropriate, and make the program more difficult to read.

Warnings

Don't use the suppresswarnings annotation for things that can be fixed easily. I don't recognize the "resource" warning, I guess it's specific to the compiler you're using (Eclipse?). Probably comes from using the Scanner without closing it properly. By using the try-with-resources -statement for anything that supports java.lang.AutoCloseable, this will be handled for you automatically.

Variables and naming

There's no point in trying to save a few keystrokes by using short variable names. The compiler doesn't care what the names are, so you can just as well use human-readable names. The exception here being de-facto standardized loop indices like i and j.

Any decent code editor or IDE will autocomplete the names for you, so it's not that much more to type. A modified section of your original code, notice how I also chained the call to toUpperCase() directly after the nextLine() call. No need to create a new variable for the case-corrected string:

Scanner inputScanner = new Scanner(System.in);

String input = inputScanner.nextLine().toUpperCase();

Object methods

Familiarize yourself with the Java standard library and API. The String class has a method for returning its contents as a char array: toCharArray(). You could use that, combined with the enhanced for loop to simplify your loop:

String input = // fetch string somehow

for (char inputChar : input.toCharArray()) {

    // Loop processing here

}

Printing an array is similarly a one-line operation: System.out.println(Arrays.toString(your array here))

Tips and tricks

There's a neat(?) trick for calculations using chars in Java. As you are upper-casing all the chars, you can use 'A' as the base for the array index. So instead of having two arrays, one with the frequencies, one for the char-to-index mapping, use subtraction from 'A' to get the index:

for (char inputChar : input.toCharArray()) {

    frequencies[inputChar - 'A']++;

}

Alternative implementation

Here's my alternative implementation using only the same data structures as in your original post. I do agree with Vishal Dhanotiya about the use of a map for this.

import java.util.Arrays;

import java.util.Scanner;



public class Letters {

    public static void main(String[] args) {



        int[] frequencies = new int[26];



        try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in)) {

            System.out.print("Enter a string: ");

            String input = scanner.nextLine().toUpperCase().replaceAll("[^A-Z]", "");



            for (char inputChar : input.toCharArray()) {

                frequencies[inputChar - 'A']++;

            }



            for (int i = 0; i < frequencies.length; i++) {

                System.out.printf("%s: %d, ", (char)('A' + i), frequencies[i]);

            }

        }

    }

}

You can use hash map in java to calculate the frequency of characters in a string

import java.util.Map;

import java.util.HashMap;



public class Letters { 

  public static void main(String[] args) {



  String str = "check repeated alphabets from a string "; 



    int len = str.length();



   Map<Character, Integer> numChars = new HashMap<Character, Integer>(Math.min(len, 26));



   for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i) { 



   char charAt = str.charAt(i); 



   if (!numChars.containsKey(charAt)) {



        numChars.put(charAt, 1); 



    } else { 



       numChars.put(charAt, numChars.get(charAt) + 1);



     } } 



    System.out.println(numChars);

}



}

Result

{" " =5, a=5, b=1, c=2, d=1, e=6, h=3, k=1, l=1, m=1, n=1, o=1, p=2, r=2, s=1, t=2, w=1, y=1}