Sort on a string that may contain a number

Question

I need to write a Java Comparator class that compares Strings, however with one twist. If the two strings it is comparing are the same at the beginning and end of the strin

Answer 1

I came up with a quite simple implementation in Java using regular expressions:

public static Comparator naturalOrdering() {
    final Pattern compile = Pattern.compile("(\\d+)|(\\D+)");
    return (s1, s2) -> {
        final Matcher matcher1 = compile.matcher(s1);
        final Matcher matcher2 = compile.matcher(s2);
        while (true) {
            final boolean found1 = matcher1.find();
            final boolean found2 = matcher2.find();
            if (!found1 || !found2) {
                return Boolean.compare(found1, found2);
            } else if (!matcher1.group().equals(matcher2.group())) {
                if (matcher1.group(1) == null || matcher2.group(1) == null) {
                    return matcher1.group().compareTo(matcher2.group());
                } else {
                    return Integer.valueOf(matcher1.group(1)).compareTo(Integer.valueOf(matcher2.group(1)));
                }
            }
        }
    };
}

Here is how it works:

final List strings = Arrays.asList("x15", "xa", "y16", "x2a", "y11", "z", "z5", "x2b", "z");
strings.sort(naturalOrdering());
System.out.println(strings);

[x2a, x2b, x15, xa, y11, y16, z, z, z5]