How to find the index of an element in an array in Java?

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I am looking to find the index of a given element, knowing its contents, in Java.

I tried the following example, which does not work:

class masi { 
    public static void main( String[] args ) { 
        char[] list = {'m', 'e', 'y'};

        // should print 1
        System.out.println(list[] == "e");                    
    } 
}

Can anyone please explain what is wrong with this and what I need to do to fix it?

indexing arrays java
15 Answers

For primitive arrays

Starting with Java 8, the general purpose solution for a primitive array arr, and a value to search val, is:

public static int indexOf(char[] arr, char val) {
    return IntStream.range(0, arr.length).filter(i -> arr[i] == val).findFirst().orElse(-1);
}

This code creates a stream over the indexes of the array with IntStream.range, filters the indexes to keep only those where the array's element at that index is equal to the value searched and finally keeps the first one matched with findFirst. findFirst returns an OptionalInt, as it is possible that no matching indexes were found. So we invoke orElse(-1) to either return the value found or -1 if none were found.

Overloads can be added for int[], long[], etc. The body of the method will remain the same.

For Object arrays

For object arrays, like String[], we could use the same idea and have the filtering step using the equals method, or Objects.equals to consider two null elements equal, instead of ==.

But we can do it in a simpler manner with:

public static <T> int indexOf(T[] arr, T val) {
    return Arrays.asList(arr).indexOf(val);
}

This creates a list wrapper for the input array using Arrays.asList and searches the index of the element with indexOf.

This solution does not work for primitive arrays, as shown here: a primitive array like int[] is not an Object[] but an Object; as such, invoking asList on it creates a list of a single element, which is the given array, not a list of the elements of the array.

user_17438800 
int i = 0;
int count = 1;
        while ('e'!= list[i] ) {
            i++;
            count++;
        }

        System.out.println(count);
user_148252080
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