Question

All I am doing is add three strings to a Java PriorityQueue and then print them out
This is my code:

import java.util.*;
import java.lang.*;

class Main
{
    public static void main (String[] args) throws java.lang.Exception
    {
        PriorityQueue<String> pq=new PriorityQueue<String>();
        pq.add("abc");
        pq.add("ability");
        pq.add("aberdeen");

        String s="ability";
        System.out.println(s.compareTo("aberdeen"));

        System.out.println(pq);
    }
}

And this is the output:

4
[abc, ability, aberdeen]

Shouldn’t this be abc, aberdeen, ability instead. since that’s the correct alphabetic order?

Answer 1

From the documentation of PriorityQueue.iterator():

Returns an iterator over the elements in this queue. The iterator does not return the elements in any particular order.

That’s what toString() is using to construct the string representation, as the implementation is inherited from AbstractCollection:

Returns a string representation of this collection. The string representation consists of a list of the collection’s elements in the order they are returned by its iterator, enclosed in square brackets (“[]”). […]

Try dequeuing the results instead, and you’ll get the expected order:

while (pq.size() > 0) {
    System.out.println(pq.poll());
}

Output:

abc
aberdeen
ability