I am working through the CodingBat exercises for Java. I just completed this one, an exercise that requests the comparison of substrings of two strings.

public int stringMatch(String a, String b) {
 int count = 0;
 String sub2 = "";
 String arrayA[] = new String[a.length()];
 String arrayB[] = new String[b.length()];
 for (int i = 0; i < a.length()-1; i++) {
 sub2 = a.substring(i, i+2);
 arrayA[i] = sub2; 
 }
 
 for (int i = 0; i < b.length()-1; i++) {
 sub2 = b.substring(i, i+2);
 arrayB[i] = sub2; 
 }
 for (int j = 0; j < arrayA.length-1; j++) {
 if (j >= b.length())
 break;
 
 if (arrayA[j].equals(arrayB[j]))
 count++;
 }
 return count;
}

 public int stringMatch(String a, String b) {
 int len = Math.min(a.length(), b.length());
 int count = 0;
 
 for (int i=0; i<len-1; i++) {
 String aSub = a.substring(i, i+2);
 String bSub = b.substring(i, i+2);
 if (aSub.equals(bSub)) { // Use .equals() with strings
 count++;
 }
 }
 return count;
}

This is merely an example, but for all exercises like this, my code is longer and messy and drawn out compared to other people's.

Should I be focussing heavily on more concise solutions to these sorts of problems in order to rework my existing coding? Should I be concentrating on conciseness of code?

Or should I keep going with exercises based on my intuition, and learn as I go? How did you learn?

I am working through the CodingBat exercises for Java. I just completed this one, an exercise that requests the comparison of substrings of two strings:

Given 2 strings, a and b, return the number of the positions where they contain the same length 2 substring. So "xxcaazz" and "xxbaaz" yields 3, since the "xx", "aa", and "az" substrings appear in the same place in both strings.

stringMatch("xxcaazz", "xxbaaz") → 3 
stringMatch("abc", "abc") → 2 
stringMatch("abc", "axc") → 0

public int stringMatch(String a, String b) {
 int count = 0;
 String sub2 = "";
 String arrayA[] = new String[a.length()];
 String arrayB[] = new String[b.length()];
 for (int i = 0; i < a.length()-1; i++) {
 sub2 = a.substring(i, i+2);
 arrayA[i] = sub2; 
 }
 
 for (int i = 0; i < b.length()-1; i++) {
 sub2 = b.substring(i, i+2);
 arrayB[i] = sub2; 
 }
 for (int j = 0; j < arrayA.length-1; j++) {
 if (j >= b.length())
 break;
 
 if (arrayA[j].equals(arrayB[j]))
 count++;
 }
 return count;
}

public int stringMatch(String a, String b) {
 int len = Math.min(a.length(), b.length());
 int count = 0;
 
 for (int i=0; i<len-1; i++) {
 String aSub = a.substring(i, i+2);
 String bSub = b.substring(i, i+2);
 if (aSub.equals(bSub)) { // Use .equals() with strings
 count++;
 }
 }
 return count;
}

I feel that my code is longer and messy and drawn out compared to other people's. As a beginner programmer, how should I improve it?