find the nth occurence of a substring in a string in java?

Question

I have a string that is the complete content of an html page and I am trying to find the index of 2nd occurence of . Does anyone have any suggesti

Answer 1

A generalization of @BasVanDenBroek's answer, using indexOf:

public static int nthIndexOf(String source, String sought, int n) {
    int index = source.indexOf(sought);
    if (index == -1) return -1;

    for (int i = 1; i < n; i++) {
        index = source.indexOf(sought, index + 1);
        if (index == -1) return -1;
    }
    return index;
}

Quick and dirty test:

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abc abc abc", "abc", 1));
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abc abc abc", "abc", 2));
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abcabcabc", "abc", 2));
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abcabcabc", "abc", 3));
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abc abc abc", "abc", 3));
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abc abc defasabc", "abc", 3));
    System.out.println(nthIndexOf("abc abc defasabc", "abc", 4));
}