Java: Sort a list of words by length, then by alphabetical order

Question

I am told to have a list of words sorted by length, and those that have the same length are sorted by alphabetical order. This is what I have for the method that does that s

Answer 1

you want to use a string comparator that compares by length 1st. like so:

public class LengthFirstComparator implements Comparator {
    @Override
    public int compare(String o1, String o2) {             
        if (o1.length()!=o2.length()) {
            return o1.length()-o2.length(); //overflow impossible since lengths are non-negative
        }
        return o1.compareTo(o2);
    }
}

then you could simply sort your Strings by calling Collections.sort(yourStringList, new LengthFirstComparator());