I have a list of Date objects, and a target Date. I want to find the date in the list that\'s nearest to the target date, but only dates that are before the target date.
Sietse de Kaper solution assumes a reverse sorted list, definitely not the most natural thing to have around
The natural sort order in java is following the ascending natural ordering. (see Collection.sort http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Collections.html#sort(java.util.List) documentation)
From your example,
target date = 2008-10-03 list = 2008-10-01 2008-10-02 2008-10-04
If another developper uses your method with a naive approach he would get 2008-10-01 which is not what was expected
private Date getDateNearest(List dates, Date targetDate){
Date returnDate = targetDate
for (Date date : dates) {
// if the current iteration'sdate is "before" the target date
if (date.compareTo(targetDate) <= 0) {
// if the current iteration's date is "after" the current return date
if (date.compareTo(returnDate) > 0){
returnDate=date;
}
}
}
return returnDate;
}
edit - I also like the Treeset answer but I think it might be slightly slower as it is equivalent to sorting the data then looking it up => nlog(n) for sorting and then the documentation implies it is log(n) for access so that would be nlog(n)+log(n) vs n