are two strings in the default locale Collator myCollator = Collator.getInstance(); if( myCollator.compare("abc", "ABC") < 0 ) System.out.println("abc is less than ABC"); else System.out.println("abc is greater than or equal to ABC");
You can set a Collator's strength property to determine the level of difference considered significant in comparisons. Four strengths are provided: PRIMARY, SECONDARY, TERTIARY, and IDENTICAL. The exact assignment of strengths to language features is locale dependant. For example, in Czech, "e" and "f" are considered primary differences, while "e" and "ě" are secondary differences, "e" and "E" are tertiary differences and "e" and "e" are identical. The following shows how both case and accents could be ignored for US English.
//Get the Collator for US English and set its strength to PRIMARY Collator usCollator = Collator.getInstance(Locale.US); usCollator.setStrength(Collator.PRIMARY); if( usCollator.compare("abc", "ABC") == 0 ) { System.out.println("Strings are equivalent"); }
For comparing Strings exactly once, the compare method provides the best performance. When sorting a list of Strings however, it is generally necessary to compare each String multiple times. In this case, CollationKeys provide better performance. The CollationKey class converts a String to a series of bits that can be compared bitwise against other CollationKeys. A CollationKey is created by a Collator object for a given String.
Note: CollationKeys from different Collators can not be compared. See the class description for {@link CollationKey}for an example using CollationKeys.
@see RuleBasedCollator
@see CollationKey
@see CollationElementIterator
@see Locale
@version 1.46, 07/23/06
@author Helena Shih, Laura Werner, Richard Gillam