Please help me for the challenge!

Hey Amanda,

You made the code alot more complicated that it had to be.

Ill break down how you were supposed to complete it.

So first thing, we can create a map inside our method. Creating a set was not necessary and made your code messy.

    Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();

Next thing we want to do is loop through mPosts and do the following:

(1) the blogpost that we are currently looping on, we want to grab its category and store it as a variable so we can easily refer to it.

    for (BlogPost bp : mPosts) {
       String category = bp.getCategory();
  }

What we want to do next is check if our map contains that category. we know that if we dont have the category, we want to add it and if we already have it, then we want to increase the count by 1. We use the following method on our map which will return a null value if we do not have it.

       Integer count = map.get(category);

If we dont have the category, then we will initialize the count variable to 0

      if (count == null) {
        count=0;
      }

so now, if we didnt have the category, our count would be 0. if we did have the category, the map.get() method above wouldve stored how many counts of that category we had. we now just increase the count and put the category and the count back in the map. then return it

      count++;
      map.put(category, count);  
    }
    return map;
  }

I hope it made some sense to you. I posted the complete code below for your reference

  public Map<String, Integer> getCategoryCounts() {
    Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();
    for (BlogPost bp : mPosts) {
       String category = bp.getCategory();
       Integer count = map.get(category);
      if (count == null) {
        count=0;
      }
      count++;
      map.put(category, count);  
    }
    return map;
  }

Happy coding and best of luck,

Kevin