There are a couple of awkward things with your example class:
- it’s called People while it has a
price
andinfo
(more something for objects, not people); - when naming a class as a plural of something, it suggests it is an abstraction of more than one thing.
Anyway, here’s a demo of how to use a Comparator<T>
:
public class ComparatorDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
List<Person> people = Arrays.asList(
new Person("Joe", 24),
new Person("Pete", 18),
new Person("Chris", 21)
);
Collections.sort(people, new LexicographicComparator());
System.out.println(people);
Collections.sort(people, new AgeComparator());
System.out.println(people);
}
}
class LexicographicComparator implements Comparator<Person> {
@Override
public int compare(Person a, Person b) {
return a.name.compareToIgnoreCase(b.name);
}
}
class AgeComparator implements Comparator<Person> {
@Override
public int compare(Person a, Person b) {
return a.age < b.age ? -1 : a.age == b.age ? 0 : 1;
}
}
class Person {
String name;
int age;
Person(String n, int a) {
name = n;
age = a;
}
@Override
public String toString() {
return String.format("{name=%s, age=%d}", name, age);
}
}
EDIT
And an equivalent Java 8 demo would look like this:
public class ComparatorDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
List<Person> people = Arrays.asList(
new Person("Joe", 24),
new Person("Pete", 18),
new Person("Chris", 21)
);
Collections.sort(people, (a, b) -> a.name.compareToIgnoreCase(b.name));
System.out.println(people);
Collections.sort(people, (a, b) -> a.age < b.age ? -1 : a.age == b.age ? 0 : 1);
System.out.println(people);
}
}