Question

I am a java newbie and I am trying to understand the code given here.

What I fail to understand is that in that class StringLengthComparator, they form the “skeleton” to compare 2 objects: String o1, String o2.

When they apply the class however, there are 6 strings which are passed to StringLengthComparator and it yields the correct result.

My question is how come when only 2 objects are compared in the class, but when 6 strings are passed it yields the right result?

Obviously, I am missing something fundamental here, and therefore, any guidance on this would be great.

Answer 1

My question is how come when only 2 objects are compared in the class, but when 6 strings are passed it yields the right result?

The object’s .compare method compares two strings at a time. The Arrays.sort method calls .compare on the supplied object several times, passing it different pairs of strings from the full set of 6, using the resulting information to sort the array.