Java: sort a String array, whose strings represent int

Question

I have String[] array like

{\"3\",\"2\",\"4\",\"10\",\"11\",\"6\",\"5\",\"8\",\"9\",\"7\"}

I want to sort it in numerical ord

Answer 1

I think by far the easiest and most efficient way it to convert the Strings to ints:

int[] myIntArray = new int[myarray.length];

for (int i = 0; i < myarray.length; i++) {
    myIntArray[i] = Integer.parseInt(myarray[i]);
}

And then sort the integer array. If you really need to, you can always convert back afterwards:

for (int i = 0; i < myIntArray.length; i++) {
    myarray[i] = "" + myIntArray[i];
}

An alternative method would be to use the Comparator interface to dictate exactly how elements are compared, but that would probably amount to converting each String value to an int anyway - making the above approach much more efficient.