Program to Compare two strings in Java

In this article, we will understand how to compare two strings. Comparison between two strings can be done using the arithmetic operator ‘==’. Strings are a sequence of characters. In Java programming language, strings are treated as objects.

Below is a demonstration of the same −

Suppose our input is −

Second string : Java Program
First string :Java

The desired output would be −

The result of string comparison is: 8

Algorithm

Step 1 - START
Step 2 - Declare namely
Step 3 - Define the values.
Step 4 - Compute the lengths of the strings. Find the minimum of this length. Assign it to a variable.
Step 5 - Iterate though this value and find the character at every index in both the strings. Convert them to integer, and compare these characters.
Step 6 - Find the integer difference between these characters and return it as the output.
Step 7 - Display the result
Step 8 - Stop

Example 1

Here, we bind all the operations together under the ‘main’ function.

public class CompareStrings {
   public static void main(String args[]) {
      String input_string_1 = new String("Java Program");
      System.out.println("The string is defined as: " +input_string_1);
      String input_string_2 = new String("Java");
      System.out.println("The string is defined as: " +input_string_2);
      int length_1 = input_string_1.length();
      int length_2 = input_string_2.length();
      int minimum_length = Math.min(length_1, length_2);
      int result;
      for (int i = 0; i < minimum_length; i++) {
         int character_1 = (int)input_string_1.charAt(i);
         int character_2 = (int)input_string_2.charAt(i);
         if (character_1 != character_2) {
            result = character_1 - character_2;
         }
      }
      if (length_1 != length_2) {
         result = length_1 - length_2;
      } else {
         result = 0;
      }
      System.out.println("\nThe result of string comparison is: " +result);
   }
}

Output

The string is defined as: Java Program
The string is defined as: Java

The result of string comparison is: 8

Example 2

Here, we encapsulate the operations into functions exhibiting object-oriented programming.

public class CompareStrings {
   public static int string_compare(String input_string_1, String input_string_2) {
      int length_1 = input_string_1.length();
      int length_2 = input_string_2.length();
      int minimum_length = Math.min(length_1, length_2);
      for (int i = 0; i < minimum_length; i++) {
         int character_1 = (int)input_string_1.charAt(i);
         int character_2 = (int)input_string_2.charAt(i);
         if (character_1 != character_2) {
            return character_1 - character_2;
         }
      }
      if (length_1 != length_2) {
         return length_1 - length_2;
      } else {
         return 0;
      }
   }
   public static void main(String args[]) {
      String input_string_1 = new String("Java Program");
      System.out.println("The string is defined as: " +input_string_1);
      String input_string_2 = new String("Java");
      System.out.println("The string is defined as: " +input_string_2);
      System.out.println("\nThe result of string comparison is: " +string_compare(input_string_1, input_string_2));
   }
}

Output

The string is defined as: Java Program
The string is defined as: Java

The result of string comparison is: 8