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

Short answer: based on the context, I can't tell whether this is just some quick-and-dirty code for personal use, or a key part of Goldman Sachs' latest internal accounting software, so I'll open by saying: eww. That's a rather funky sorting algorithm; try to use something a bit less "twisty" if you can.

Long answer:

The two issues that immediately come to mind in your case are performance, and correctness. Informally, make sure it's fast, and make sure your algorithm is a total ordering.

(Of course, if you're not sorting more than about 100 items, you can probably disregard this paragraph.) Performance matters, as the speed of the comparator will be the largest factor in the speed of your sort (assuming the sort algorithm is "ideal" to the typical list). In your case, the comparator's speed will depend mainly on the size of the string. The strings seem to be fairly short, so they probably won't dominate as much as the size of your list.

Turning each string into a string-number-string tuple and then sorting this list of tuples, as suggested in another answer, will fail in some of your cases, since you apparently will have strings with multiple numbers appearing.

The other problem is correctness. Specifically, if the algorithm you described will ever permit A > B > ... > A, then your sort will be non-deterministic. In your case, I fear that it might, though I can't prove it. Consider some parsing cases such as:

  aa 0 aa
  aa 23aa
  aa 2a3aa
  aa 113aa
  aa 113 aa
  a 1-2 a
  a 13 a
  a 12 a
  a 2-3 a
  a 21 a
  a 2.3 a