Efficient way to find Frequency of a character in a String in java : O(n)

Question

In a recent interview I was asked to write the below program. Find out the character whose frequency is minimum in the given String ? So I tried by iterating through the string

Answer 1

I think your approach is in theory the most efficient (O(n)). However in practice it needs quite a lot of memory, and is probably very slow.

It is possibly more efficient (at least it uses less memory) to convert the string to a char array, sort the array, and then calculate the frequencies using a simple loop. However, in theory it is less efficient (O(n log n)) because of sorting (unless you use a more efficient sort algorithm).

Test case:

import java.util.Arrays;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
        //        System.out.println(getLowFrequencyChar("x"));
        //        System.out.println(getLowFrequencyChar("bab"));
        //        System.out.println(getLowFrequencyChar("babaa"));
        for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
            long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
            for (int j = 0; j < 1000000; j++) {
                getLowFrequencyChar("long start = System.currentTimeMillis();");
            }
            System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis() - start);
        }

    }

    private static char getLowFrequencyChar(String string) {
        int len = string.length();
        if (len == 0) {
            return 0;
        } else if (len == 1) {
            return string.charAt(0);
        }
        char[] chars = string.toCharArray();
        Arrays.sort(chars);
        int low = Integer.MAX_VALUE, f = 1;
        char last = chars[0], x = 0;
        for (int i = 1; i < len; i++) {
            char c = chars[i];
            if (c != last) {
                if (f < low) {
                    if (f == 1) {
                        return last;
                    }
                    low = f;
                    x = last;
                }
                last = c;
                f = 1;
            } else {
                f++;
            }
        }
        if (f < low) {
            x = last;
        }
        return (char) x;
    }

}