Sort List of Strings with Localization

Rahul Agrawal picture Rahul Agrawal · Oct 15, 2012 · Viewed 27.2k times · Source

I want to sort below List of strings as per user locale

List<String> words = Arrays.asList(
      "Äbc", "äbc", "Àbc", "àbc", "Abc", "abc", "ABC"
    );

For different user locale sort output should be different as per there locale.

How to sort above list as per user locale ?

I tried

Collections.sort(words , String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER);

But this is not working for localization, so how to pass locale parameter to Collections.sort() or is there any other efficient way ?

Answer

John Dvorak picture John Dvorak · Oct 15, 2012

You can use a sort with a custom Comparator. See the Collator interface

Collator coll = Collator.getInstance(locale);
coll.setStrength(Collator.PRIMARY);
Collections.sort(words, coll);

The collator is a comparator and can be passed directly to the Collections.sort(...) method.