I have two strings which are used to store time in the format hh:mm.I want to the compare these two to know which time is greater.Which is the easiest way to go about this?
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I have two strings which are used to store time in the format hh:mm.I want to the compare these two to know which time is greater.Which is the easiest way to go about this?
Well, if they’re actually hh:mm (including leading zeroes, and in 24-hour format) then you can just compare them lexicographically (i.e. using
String.compareTo(String)). That’s the benefit of a sortable format 🙂Of course, that won’t check that both values are valid times. If you need to do that, you should probably parse both times: check the length, check the colon, parse two substrings, and probably multiply the number of hours by 60 and add it to the number of minutes to get a total number of minutes. Then you can compare those two totals.
EDIT: As mentioned in the comments, if you do need to parse the values for whatever reason, personally I would recommend using Joda Time (possibly a cut down version, given the mobile nature) rather than
SimpleDateTimeFormatandDate. Joda Time is a much nicer date and time API than the built-in one.