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Java String Compareto Method

The document discusses the Java String compareTo() method, which compares two strings lexicographically and returns an integer indicating whether the first string is less than, equal to, or greater than the second string. It provides examples of using compareTo() to compare strings, and notes that compareTo() is case sensitive, while compareToIgnoreCase() performs a case-insensitive comparison.

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75 views5 pages

Java String Compareto Method

The document discusses the Java String compareTo() method, which compares two strings lexicographically and returns an integer indicating whether the first string is less than, equal to, or greater than the second string. It provides examples of using compareTo() to compare strings, and notes that compareTo() is case sensitive, while compareToIgnoreCase() performs a case-insensitive comparison.

Uploaded by

avinandan chandra
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CompareTo() metod

The Java String compareTo() method is used for comparing two strings
lexicographically. Each character of both the strings is converted into a Unicode
value for comparison. If both the strings are equal then this method returns 0 else
it returns positive or negative value. The result is positive if the first string is
lexicographically greater than the second string else the result would be
negative.

Java String compareTo() method


We have following two ways to use compareTo() method:

int compareTo(String str)


Here the comparison is between string literals. For
example string1.compareTo(string2) where string1 and string2 are String literals.

int compareTo(Object obj)


Here the comparison is between a string and an object. For
example string1.compareTo("Just a String object")where string1 is a literal and it’s value is
compared with the string specified in the method argument.

Java String compareTo() method Example


Here we have three Strings and we are comparing them with each other
using compareTo() method.

public class CompareToExample {


public static void main(String args[]) {
String str1 = "String method tutorial";
String str2 = "compareTo method example";
String str3 = "String method tutorial";

int var1 = str1.compareTo( str2 );


System.out.println("str1 & str2 comparison: "+var1);

int var2 = str1.compareTo( str3 );


System.out.println("str1 & str3 comparison: "+var2);

int var3 = str2.compareTo("compareTo method example");


System.out.println("str2 & string argument comparison: "+var3);
}
}
Output:
str1 & str2 comparison: -16
str1 & str3 comparison: 0
str2 & string argument comparison: 0
How to find length of a string using String
compareTo() method
Here we will see an interesting example of how to use the compareTo() method
to find the length of a string. If we compare a string with an empty string using
the compareTo() method then the method would return the length of the non-
empty string.

For example:

String str1 = "Negan";


String str2 = ""; //empty string

//it would return the length of str1 in positive number


str1.compareTo(str2); // 5

//it would return the length of str1 in negative number


str2.compareTo(str1); //-5
In the above code snippet, the second compareTo() statement returned the
length in negative number, this is because we have compared the empty string
with str1 while in first compareTo() statement, we have compared str1 with empty
string.

Lets see the complete example:

public class JavaExample {


public static void main(String args[]) {
String str1 = "Cow";
//This is an empty string
String str2 = "";
String str3 = "Goat";

System.out.println(str1.compareTo(str2));

System.out.println(str2.compareTo(str3));
}
}
Output:
Is Java String compareTo() method case sensitive?
In this example, we will compare two strings using compareTo() method. Both
the strings are same, however one of the string is in uppercase and the other
string is in lowercase.

public class JavaExample {


public static void main(String args[]) {
//uppercase
String str1 = "HELLO";
//lowercase
String str2 = "hello";;

System.out.println(str1.compareTo(str2));
}
}
Output:

As you can see that the output is not zero, which means that compareTo()
method is case sensitive. However we do have a case insensitive compare
method in string class, which is compareToIgnoreCase(), this method ignores the
case while comparing two strings.

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