About Comparator Interface

In K & B's book, it's said that....

..... you can use it to sort instances of any class. ...

My Question is : How it's possible?

(Can we compare by same fields of difference Class' instances)

Please Confirm? Thanks........

The statement implies that you can use Comparator to sort instances of classes that don't implement Comparable. If you implement the type safe Comparator i.e. Comparator<Type>, then your compareTo method won't get instances of different class anyways...

Ankit Garg write :

..... your compareTo method .....

.

Is that compare() method or compareTo() method in the Comparator interface? I think, compare()???

The Comparator interface contains the compare method
The Comparable interface contains the compareTo Method

Thanks Wouter Oet

You're welcome

but the compare method in Comparator makes use of compareTo method to do the comparison. That's why Ankit said compareTo method.

Ok, Neha Daga.... Thanks....

BTW, Can you give me good example, ........

read comparator from K&B all the examples make use of it.

Neha Daga wrote:but the compare method in Comparator makes use of compareTo method to do the comparison. That's why Ankit said compareTo method.

That totally depends on the implementation. If I write an implementation of Comparator then it doesn't need to a Comparable implementation:

Ankit was refering to a type safe implementation. Like he said: Comparator i.e. Comparator<Type>