How does the compareTo() method, compare strings?

java string interface comparable compareto
ekeitho picture ekeitho · Nov 2, 2012 · Viewed 36.9k times · Source

Such as if I were to compare the Strings "Hello" and "World".

How does it know Hello is greater than World?

The only thing I can come up with is, maybe it uses the ASCII Table as reference?

Thanks for the help!

Answer

PermGenError picture PermGenError · Nov 2, 2012

it compares two strings lexographically. check here in the String API.

If two strings are different, then either they have different characters at some index that is a valid index for both strings, or their lengths are different, or both. If they have different characters at one or more index positions, let k be the smallest such index; then the string whose character at position k has the smaller value, as determined by using the < operator, lexicographically precedes the other string.

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