Efficient way to compare version strings in Java [duplicate]

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, String.split() is a very easy way to do the comparison you want, and Mike Deck makes the excellent point that with such (likely) short strings, it probably won't matter much, but what the hey! If you want to make the comparison without manually parsing the string, and have the option of quitting early, you could try the java.util.Scanner class.

public static int versionCompare(String str1, String str2) {
    try ( Scanner s1 = new Scanner(str1);
          Scanner s2 = new Scanner(str2);) {
        s1.useDelimiter("\\.");
        s2.useDelimiter("\\.");

        while (s1.hasNextInt() && s2.hasNextInt()) {
            int v1 = s1.nextInt();
            int v2 = s2.nextInt();
            if (v1 < v2) {
                return -1;
            } else if (v1 > v2) {
                return 1;
            }
        }

        if (s1.hasNextInt() && s1.nextInt() != 0)
            return 1; //str1 has an additional lower-level version number
        if (s2.hasNextInt() && s2.nextInt() != 0)
            return -1; //str2 has an additional lower-level version 

        return 0;
    } // end of try-with-resources
}