In this Java tutorial, you will learn how to find the index of first occurrence of a search string in a given string using String.indexOf() function, with examples.

Get the index of the first occurrence of a substring in a String

To find the index of first occurrence of a substring in a string you can use String.indexOf() function.

A string, say str2, can occur in another string, say str1, n number of times. There could be a requirement in your Java application, that you have to find the position of the first occurrence of str2 in str1. Or you may need to find nth occurrence.

In this tutorial, we shall learn to get the index of first occurrence of a string in another string using Java.

We shall make use of String.indexOf(String otherString) method, to find the index of first occurrence of string str2 in str1. If the string str2 is present in the other string str1, it returns the index of its first occurrence. If it is not present, then it returns -1 indicating that the string str2 is not present in the string str1.

Examples

1. Get the index of first occurrence of a substring

In this example, we shall initialize two strings with variable names str1 and str2. And we are going to find the first occurrence of str2 in str1.

/**
 * Java Example program to find the index of first occurrence of a substring in a string
 */
public class FirstOccurrenceExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		//initialize strings
		String str1 = "hello world good morning. good day.";
		String str2 = "good";

		//get the index of str2 in str1
		int indexOfSubStr = str1.indexOf(str2);
		
		System.out.println("str2 first appeared in str1 at index : "+ indexOfSubStr);
	}
}

When the above program is run, the output to the console is as shown below :

str2 first appeared in str1 at index : 12

2. Get the index of first occurrence of a substring – Ignore Case

In this example, we ignore the case of both the strings and try to find the occurrence of string str2 in string str1. To ignore the case, we have actually converted the strings to lowercase and then applied the function indexOf().

Please note that with the strings str1 and str2 in the below program, if you consider the case, indexOf() would return -1. But as we are ignoring the case, we got str2="GOOD" and GoOd in str1 matched.

/**
 * Java Example program to find the index of first occurrence of a substring in a string
 */
public class FirstOccurrenceExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		//initialize strings
		String str1 = "hello world GoOd morning. gOOD day.";
		String str2 = "GOOD";

		//ignore case and get the index of str2 in str1
		int indexOfSubStr = str1.toLowerCase().indexOf(str2.toLowerCase());
		
		System.out.println("str2 first appeared in str1 at index : "+ indexOfSubStr);
	}
}

Run the program.

str2 first appeared in str1 at index : 12

Conclusion

In this Java Tutorial, we have learned how to get index of first occurrence of a substring in a String, by considering or ignoring the case of alphabets.