Java how to sort lowercase before uppercase strings

Question

I want the files to be ordered by their abs path name, but I want the lowercase to be sorted before the uppercase. Example: Let\'s say I got 4 files:

files2.         


        

Answer 1

As suggested by others, Collator does what you want. Writing one of those collator rules looked a bit scary, but it looks like the standard English Collator does exactly what you want:

public static void main(String... args)
{
    List items = Arrays.asList("b", "A", "a", "B");
    Collections.sort(items, Collator.getInstance(Locale.ENGLISH));
    System.out.println(items);
}

gives:

[a, A, b, B]