Question

I work at a printing company that has many programs in COBOL and I have been tasked to
convert the COBOL programs into JAVA programs. I’ve run into a snag in the one conversion. I need to take a file that each line is a record and on each line the data is blocked.

Example of a line is

60000003448595072410013 FFFFFFFFFFV 80     0001438001000014530020120808060134

I need to sort data by a 5 digit number at the 19-23 characters and then by the very first character on a line.

BufferedReader input;
BufferedWriter output;

String[] sort, sorted, style, accountNumber, customerNumber;
String holder;

int lineCount;

int lineCounter() {

    int result = 0;
    boolean eof = false;

    try {
        FileReader inputFile = new FileReader("C:\\Users\\cbook\\Desktop\\Chemical\\"
             + "LB26529.fil");
        input = new BufferedReader(inputFile);

        while (!eof) {

            holder = input.readLine();
            if (holder == null) {
                eof = true;
            } else {
                result++;
            }
        }

    } catch (IOException e) {
        System.out.println("Error - " + e.toString());
    }

    return result;
}

chemSort(){
    lineCount = this.lineCounter();
    sort = new String[lineCount];
    sorted = new String[lineCount];
    style = new String[lineCount];
    accountNumber = new String[lineCount];
    customerNumber = new String[lineCount];

    try {
        FileReader inputFile = new FileReader("C:\\Users\\cbook\\Desktop\\Chemical\\"
             + "LB26529.fil");
        input = new BufferedReader(inputFile);

        for (int i = 0; i < (lineCount + 1); i++) {
            holder = input.readLine();
            if (holder != null) {
            sort[i] = holder;
            style[i] = sort[i].substring(0, 1);
            customerNumber[i] = sort[i].substring(252, 257);
            }
        }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            System.out.println("Error - " + e.toString());
    }
}

This what I have so far and I’m not really sure where to go from here or even if this is the correct way
to go about sorting the file. After the file is sorted it will be stored into another file and processed
again with another program for it to be ready for printing.

Answer 1

List<String> linesAsList = new ArrayList<String>();
String line=null;
while(null!=(line=reader.readLine())) linesAsList.add(line);

Collections.sort(linesAsList, new Comparator<String>() {
  public int compare(String o1,String o2){
    return (o1.substring(18,23)+o1.substring(0,1)).compareTo(o2.substring(18,23)+o2.substring(0,1));
  }});

for (String line:linesAsList) System.out.println(line); // or whatever output stream you want

This phone’s autocorrect is messing up my answer