Thread: How to get the highest value of an array of integers?

I am trying to write a method that returns the busiest hour in a logAnalyzer class that read web server data and analyze hourly access patterns and stores them in an array. My problem is, in order to get the busiest hour, I need to go through the hourCounts array to find the element with the biggest count.
Any suggestions please?

Going through all the elements of the array I am using a for loop, getting each count every time I loop through the array. how to specify in the loop body which from all the counts is the biggest in order to return the associated hour with that count.

/**
     * Returns the busiest hour of the day.
     */
    public int busiestHour()
    {
        int theBusiestHour = 0;
        // The hourCounts array has length = 24.
        for(int hour = 0; hour < hourCounts.length; hour++) {
 
        }
        return theBusiestHour;
    }

To make it more clear about what I want.

Norm I cant set the variable with the max value to the first element of the array because it would always return as the busiest hour to be midnight. I need help to understand how to find the the biggest count in the array in order to assign the associated hour to theBusiestHour variable.

I don't think you understood Norm. Use a variable as the highest value set to the first value in the array:

int highestValue = hourCounts( 0 );
int highestElement = 0;

Compare each of the remaining array elements to highestValue using a loop that examines each element of the array, and if a new higher value is found, update the highestValue AND highestElement variables. Return the highestElement value, because that points to the highestValue in the array hourCounts().

Good luck!