How to count vowels in a String including which have accent marks?

Question

First of all, excuse me for my bad english. It's not my native language (this is one of my problems, you'll see later why).

I'm making a method in Java and it is proposed to count vowels of a String. The input comes from windows prompt, because i'm compiling and executing using javac and java commands, respectively.

I've written some lines of code to solve the exercise but i can't count vowels which have accent marks. eg. When i try "canción", its output just count 2 vowels.

public static int countVowels(String text){
    int answer = 0;
    String test = "AEIOUaeiou";
    for (int i = 0; i < text.length(); i++)
        for (int j = 0; j < test.length(); j++)
            if (text.charAt(i) == test.charAt(j))   {
                answer++;
                break;
            }
    return answer;
}

public static void form() {
    Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
    System.out.println("This program counts the number of vowels.");
    int answer = 0;
    String text = "";
    while (!text.equals("-1"))  {
        System.out.print("Enter a line of text (-1 to exit): ");
        text = in.nextLine();
        answer = Character.countVowels(text);
        System.out.println("Number of vowels: " + answer);
    }
    System.out.println("Closing the program...");
}

I'm using Scanner as input method.

I tried comparing 2 Strings, 'cause i think using if(text.charAt(i) == 'A') is just boring (Maybe i'm wrong).

Really I don´t know what to do. I've tried using Ascii values (193 = Á), I tried just writing de vowels with accent mark in the test String String test = "AEIOUaeiouÁÉÍÓÚáéíóú";.

Nothing works. I'll be very grateful to the person who can help me.

PS, i'm not allowed to use array.

Possible duplicate of [What's the best way to check if a character is a vowel in Java?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26557604/whats-the-best-way-to-check-if-a-character-is-a-vowel-in-java) — Erwin Bolwidt, Jul 08 '16 at 02:53
I wouldn't call your class `Character` as that name clashes with `java.lang.Character`. In general, don't use a class name that exists in the `java.lang` package, as this leads to a lot of confusion, because it is auto-imported in each java source file. — Erwin Bolwidt, Jul 08 '16 at 02:55
Hmm interesting. As far as I know, we cannot count the accented vowels unless we include those in an if clause as well. This would mean identifying all the possible accented characters which are vowels and increasing a counter every time we encounter one. — Aditya Gupta, Jul 08 '16 at 05:24

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 08 '16 at 11:10

The simplest way to count "vowels" is this one-liner:

int vowelCount = str.replaceAll("[^AEIOUaeiouÁÉÍÓÚáéíóú]", "").length();

This find using regex and deletes (replaces with blank) all characters not one of the ones listed (via the negative character class).

How to count vowels in a String including which have accent marks?

1 Answers1