Comparing Strings

Improving Collation Performance

Sorting long lists of strings is often time consuming. If your sort algorithm compares strings repeatedly you can speed up the process by using the CollationKey class.

A CollationKeyobject represents a sort key for a given String and Collator. Comparing two CollationKey objects involves a bitwise comparison of sort keys, and is faster than comparing String objects with the Collator.compare method. However, generating CollationKey objects requires time. Therefore, if a String is to be compared just once, Collator.compare offers better performance.

In the example that follows, we'll use a CollationKey object to sort an array of words. The source code for this example is in the file named KeysDemo.java.

We create an array of CollationKey objects in the main method. To create a CollationKey, you invoke the getCollationKey method upon a Collator object. You cannot compare two CollationKey objects unless they originate from the same Collator. The main method is as follows:

static public void main(String[] args) {

   Collator enUSCollator = Collator.getInstance(new Locale("en","US"));

   String [] words = {
     "peach",
     "apricot",
     "grape",
     "lemon"
   };

   CollationKey[] keys = new CollationKey[words.length];

   for (int k = 0; k < keys.length; k ++) {
      keys[k] = enUSCollator.getCollationKey(words[k]);
   }

   sortArray(keys);
   printArray(keys);
}

The sortArray method invokes the CollationKey.compareTo method. The compareTo method returns an integer less than, equal to, or greater than zero if the keys[i] object is less than, equal to, or greater than the keys[j] object. Note that we compare the CollationKey objects, not the String objects from the original array of words. Here is the code for the sortArray method:

public static void sortArray(CollationKey[] keys) {

    CollationKey tmp;

    for (int i = 0; i < keys.length; i++) {
       for (int j = i + 1; j < keys.length; j++) {
          // Compare the keys
          if( keys[i].compareTo( keys[j] ) > 0 ) {
             // Swap keys[i] and keys[j]
             tmp = keys[i];
             keys[i] = keys[j];
             keys[j] = tmp;
          }
       }
    }
}

We've sorted an array of CollationKey objects, but our original goal was to sort an array of String objects. To retrieve the String representation of each CollationKey, we invoke getSourceString in our displayWords method:

static void displayWords(CollationKey[] keys) {

   for (int i = 0; i < keys.length; i++) {
      System.out.println(keys[i].getSourceString() + "  ");
   }
}

The displayWords method prints the following lines:

apricot  
grape  
lemon  
peach  

Comparing Strings