Re: counting quotations by author

From:

Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.help

Date:

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:50:16 -0500

Message-ID:

<gidnvb$dib$1@news.motzarella.org>

RedGrittyBrick wrote:

Roedy Green wrote:

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:15:16 -0800, Roedy Green
<see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
someone who said :

How could I get a list of authors sorted by frequency of being
mentioned?

Here is the solution I came up with. It seems rather clumsy. I
wondered how you might simplify it.

...

4. export the HashMap to an array of RankedAuthors through a series
of steps.

5. sort the array.

6. print the array.

I just wrote the code. I came up with one simplification. I don't use
a Counter class. Instead I use RankedAuthor for both purposes. This
simplifies the export and cuts out one trivial class.

In order to avoid a separate sort step, I'd maintain RankedAuthor in
sorted order as authors are added and as authors' counts are
incremented. I guess this would require using a linked list or some
suitable Collection such as SortedSet with an implementation of
Comparator in RankedAuthor.

I guess this would be both harder and slower than just
doing one sort at the end. Keeping all the items sorted by
count during the accumulation phase (when the order doesn't
matter) has *got* to be more work than sorting them once.

Myself, I'd use a HashMap<String,RankedAuthor> for the
accumulation phase. Then I'd call values() to extract the
RankedAuthor items, put them in a List (or array), and sort
it with a suitable Comparator.

--
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid