The general sorting program
In the previous chapter, we implemented a simple sorting algorithm. The code can sort elements of a String
array. We did this to learn. For practical use, there is a ready-cooked sort solution in the JDK that can sort members of Collection
objects that are comparable.
The JDK contains a utility class called Collections
, which itself contains a static method, Collections.sort
. This method can sort any List
that has members that are Comparable
(more precisely, members that are instances of a class that implements the Comparable
interface). List
and Comparable
are interfaces defined in the JDK. Thus, if we want to sort a list of Strings
, the simplest solution is as follows:
public class SimplestStringListSortTest { @Test public void canSortStrings() { var actualNames = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList( "Johnson", "Wilson", "Wilkinson", "Abraham", "Dagobert" )); Collections.sort(actualNames); Assert...