Efficient way to compare version strings in Java [duplicate]

Answer 1

Adapted from Alex Gitelman's answer.

int compareVersions( String str1, String str2 ){

    if( str1.equals(str2) ) return 0; // Short circuit when you shoot for efficiency

    String[] vals1 = str1.split("\\.");
    String[] vals2 = str2.split("\\.");

    int i=0;

    // Most efficient way to skip past equal version subparts
    while( i

So as you can see, not so trivial. Also this fails when you allow leading 0's, but I've never seen a version "1.04.5" or w/e. You would need to use integer comparison in the while loop to fix that. This gets even more complex when you mix letters with numbers in the version strings.