What is a Comparator in Java?

Java Comparator interface is used to order the objects of a user-defined class. This interface is found in java. util package and contains 2 methods compare(Object obj1,Object obj2) and equals(Object element).

How do you pass a Comparator in Java?

There are several ways to implement Comparators in Java:

  1. Pass Comparator as argument to sort() method. Comparators, if passed to a sort method (such as Collections.
  2. Implement Comparator in a separate class.
  3. Pass Comparator to List.sort() method.

Can we use Comparator with ArrayList?

Comparator is used to sort an ArrayList of User-defined objects. To sort an ArrayList using Comparator we need to override the compare() method provided by comparator interface. After rewriting the compare() method we need to call collections. sort() method like below.

What is a comparator method?

Method 2: Using comparator interface- Comparator interface is used to order the objects of a user-defined class. util package and contains 2 methods compare(Object obj1, Object obj2) and equals(Object element). Using a comparator, we can sort the elements based on data members.

Can we use comparator with list in Java?

Method 2: Using comparator interface- Comparator interface is used to order the objects of a user-defined class. This interface is present in java. Method of Collections class for sorting List elements is used to sort the elements of List by the given comparator.

Is ArrayList fail fast?

Iterator of ArrayList is fail fast , so while you are iterating over the ArrayList using the Iterator if underlying ArrayList is modified by any method other than add and remove provided by Iterator itself it will throw ConcurrentModificationException and will bail out.

What is comparable and comparator in Java?

In brief, Comparable and Comparator are two interfaces to sort objects using the data members of the class. The main difference between Comparable and Comparator in Java is that Comparable sorts the collection based on a single element while Comparator sorts the collection based on multiple elements.

How do I compare objects in Java?

When you start working with objects in Java, you find that you can use == and != to compare objects with one another. For instance, a button that you see on the computer screen is an object. You can ask whether the thing that was just mouse-clicked is a particular button on your screen.

How to compare two objects/references in Java?

In Java, the == operator compares that two references are identical or not. Whereas the equals() method compares two objects. Objects are equal when they have the same state (usually comparing variables). Objects are identical when they share the class identity. For example, the expression obj1==obj2 tests the identity, not equality.

What does compareTo method return in Java?

The Java String compareTo() method is used for comparing two strings lexicographically. Each character of both the strings is converted into a Unicode value for comparison. If both the strings are equal then this method returns 0 else it returns positive or negative value.