First occurrence in a binary search

I’m tinkering with some code and I realized something I never knew. A normal binary search will return a random index in a data set for a key that occurs more than once. How can I modify this code below to return the first occurrence? Is this something people do?

//ripped from the JDK
public static int binarySearchValue(InvertedContainer.InvertedIndex[] a, long key) {
    return bSearchVal(a, 0, a.length, key);
}

private static int bSearchVal(InvertedContainer.InvertedIndex[] a, int fromIndex,
                                 int toIndex, long key) {
    int low = fromIndex;
    int high = toIndex - 1;

    while (low <= high) {
        int mid = (low + high) >>> 1;
        long midVal = a[mid].val;

        if (midVal < key)
            low = mid + 1;
        else if (midVal > key)
            high = mid - 1;
        else
            return mid; // key found
    }
    return (low); // key not found. return insertion point
}

Answer

Having found a matching value, you basically need to walk up the collection until you find an entry which doesn’t match.

You could potentially make it faster by fetching the index of a key immediately lower than the one you were looking for, then do a binary chop between the two – but I’d probably go for the simpler version, which is likely to be “efficient enough” unless you’ve got a really large number of equal entries.