Is there an analogue of put function of Map interface in List?

I have an ArrayList(input) of Node objects. Each node stores the information about how many times a sentence has been searched. The definition of Node class is –

class Node {
    String sentence;
    int count;

    Node(String st, int t) {
        sentence = st;
        count = t;
    }
}

the attribute sentence stores the sentence and count the number of times it was searched. Now I am given a sentence and I want to add it to this list with the updated count. The problem is the sentence may already be present in the list, in which case I just have to update the count attribute of that particular node by +1. In map interface it is easy by using –

map.put(sentence, map.getOrDefault(sentence, 0) + 1);

But how can I do it in List?

Answer

Like you I like to go object-oriented. A Map<String, Integer> isn’t satisfactory. We want to use your Node class.

I think that what you want is a Map<String, Node>. With it you can look up the node from the sentence. You may fit your Node class with a method to increment the count. And use computeIfAbsent() to create new nodes as necessary.

    Map<String, Node> map = new HashMap<>();
    
    map.computeIfAbsent("Cat", s -> new Node(s, 0)).incrementCount();
    map.computeIfAbsent("House", s -> new Node(s, 0)).incrementCount();
    map.computeIfAbsent("Cat", s -> new Node(s, 0)).incrementCount();
    
    System.out.println(map.values());

With a simple toString method in your class the output is:

[Cat: 2, House: 1]

I would also find it perfectly meaningful if your constructor takes only one argument, the sentence, and always sets count to 0. Or you may have both constructors.