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Applications that sort through text perform frequent string comparisons. For example, a report generator performs string comparisons when sorting a list of strings in alphabetical order.If your application audience is limited to people who speak English, you can probably perform string comparisons with the
String.compareTomethod. TheString.compareTomethod performs a binary comparison of the Unicode characters within the two strings. For most languages, however, this binary comparison cannot be relied on to sort strings, because the Unicode values do not correspond to the relative order of the characters.Fortunately the
Collatorclass allows your application to perform string comparisons for different languages. In this section, you'll learn how to use the
Collatorclass when sorting text.
Collation rules define the sort sequence of strings.
These rules vary with locale,
because various natural languages sort words differently.
Using the predefined collation rules provided by the
Collator class, you can sort strings
in a locale-independent manner.
In some cases, the predefined collation rules provided by theCollatorclass may not work for you. For example, you may want to sort strings in a language whose locale is not supported byCollator. In this situation, you can define your own collation rules, and assign them to aRuleBasedCollatorobject.
With theCollationKeyclass, you may increase the efficiency of string comparisons. This class convertsStringobjects to sort keys that follow the rules of a givenCollator.
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