Question

I have these strings in an ArrayList of String in no particular order but when I invoke Collections.sort(listReference), the sorted result is incorrect, why do 10 and 11 (the last 2 characters) come before 07, 08, 09?

12880  20090506054200001
12880  20090506054200002
12880  20090513070200003
12880  20090513070200004
12880  20090520202600005
12880  20090520202600006
12880  20090520232900010
12880  20090520232900011
12880  20090520232900007
12880  20090520232900008
12880  20090520232900009

Answer 1

It works fine for me:

import java.util.*;

public class Test {

      public static void main(String[] args) {
        ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
        list.add("12880  20090506054200001");
        list.add("12880  20090506054200002");
        list.add("12880  20090513070200003");
        list.add("12880  20090513070200004");
        list.add("12880  20090520202600005");
        list.add("12880  20090520202600006");
        list.add("12880  20090520232900010");
        list.add("12880  20090520232900011");
        list.add("12880  20090520232900007");
        list.add("12880  20090520232900008");
        list.add("12880  20090520232900009");

        Collections.sort(list);

        for (String x : list) {
          System.out.println(x);
        }
      }
    }

Output:

12880  20090506054200001
12880  20090506054200002
12880  20090513070200003
12880  20090513070200004
12880  20090520202600005
12880  20090520202600006
12880  20090520232900007
12880  20090520232900008
12880  20090520232900009
12880  20090520232900010
12880  20090520232900011

Are you absolutely sure that your 7/8/9 entries don’t have something “odd” in them elsewhere (e.g. a different element of whitespace between 12880 and the timestamp)?

If not, can you produce a short but complete program that demonstrates the problem?