Counting word occurences in a string

Question

I found there are 2 ways to count them, which are:
1) Using array and split()
2) Using int var and split()

//second method
String str = "i have a male cat. the color of male cat is Black";
int c = str.split("male cat").length - 1;

im still confused on how the second method works. How does it really work?

Answer 1

"i have a #. the color of # is Black"
I just replaced male cat with # for convenience. Now when you split the string, you can see that it is split into 3 parts.

One part before 1st #
One part after 2nd #
One part between 1st and 2nd #

So the length()-1 will return 2 which the number of occurrence of the 'male cat'.

Answer 2

@Avinesh
thank youuuu