Question about Sorting with Hashtable

[Manimekala Velautham]

Hi

I want to sort a Hashtable's values in alphabetical,with duplicates and in case_insensitive manner. I tried the following code. Please take a look.

Hashtable myhash = Hashtable();
myhash.put(1,"Z");
myhash.put(5,"A");
myhash.put(4,"A");
myhash.put(3,"a");
myhash.put(2,"b");
 
ArrayList<String> sortedValues = new ArrayList<String>();
sortedValues.addAll(myhash.values());
Collections.sort(sortedValues,String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER);
Iterator itr = sortedValues.iterator();
while(itr.hasNext()) {
 String s = (String) itr.next();
 System.out.println("Site name is "+ s);
}

With the above code I got the values in the Hashtable alphabetically,with duplicates and in case_insensitive manner. Now I want to have corresponding keys also. How to do this?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks
Manimekala

[Peter Chase]

Sounds like you want a SortedMap, not a Hashtable (*). There is an implementation of SortedMap in the API; look up TreeMap.

(*) Note that you almost never actually want a Hashtable. That's an old, obsolete class. Where you might have used Hashtable, you should generally use HashMap.

[Joanne Neal]

If I understand the OP correctly, he wants the keys in the order specified by the sorted values. If that's right, then a SortedMap won't work, as that is sorted by the keys.

As Peter says, it is better to use a HashMap. You can retrieve a set of Map.Entry objects from this using the entrySet method. These objects contain the key and value. You will then need to write a Comparator to sort these and pass an instance of this Comparator to the Collections.sort method.

Your Comparator will be pretty simple. In the overridden compare method, simply use the Map.Entry.getValue method to retrieve the values and compare them using the String.compareToIgnoreCase method.

Of course, if Peter's interpretation of your question was correct, just ignore this post.