The method compareTo() is used for comparing two strings lexicographically in Java. Lexical order is nothing but alphabetically order. To sort a string value alphabetically − Get the required string. Introduction : Sometimes we need to sort all characters in a string alphabetically. vectornames; for i=0:n-1 input each name; insert name into the vector End for loop. If you want to ignore case differences when comparing two strings, use compareToIgnoreCase( ), You can do it by converting the string to char array and use methods of Arrays class in java.util package to sort. Sort the obtained array using the sort() method of the Arrays class.. compareTo() method can be accessed by the instance of String class. Syntax. Learn to arrange an array of strings alphabetically using a simple Sava program. The toCharArray() method of this class converts the String to a character array and returns it. In this method, if the first string is always lexicographically higher than second string, it returns a positive number. Java Example: Arranging Strings in an Alphabetical Order In this program, we are asking user to enter the count of strings that he would like to enter for sorting. In this article, we will discuss how we can compare two strings lexicographically in Java. Using the toCharArray() method. Previous Page. This method compares this String to another Object. Description. For example, String ‘albert’ will become ‘abelrt’ after sorting. Each character of both the strings … Sorting in alphabetical order. Declare a vector of strings & take each string &insert to the vector. sort() method. So we need to compare two strings alphabetically i.e character by character. To sort strings in alphabetical order in Java programming, you have to ask to the user to enter the two string, now start comparing the two strings, if found then make a variable say temp of the same type, now place the first string to the temp, then place the second string to the first, and place temp to the second string and continue. If you are truly comparing Strings alphabetically to arrange them in order, use compareTo() method from Comparable interface in Java. Next Page . Sort a String in alphabetically / ascending order. compareTo() Java method does a sequential comparison of letters in the string that have the same position. Convert a string str to char array by using str.toCharArray() method; Sort the char array ascending by using Arrays.sort method One solution is to use Java compareTo() method. Once the count is captured using Scanner class, we have initialized a String array of the input count size and then are running a for loop to capture all the strings input by user . compareTo() is a String class method which returns the lexicographical difference between two Strings(i.e compares two strings lexicographically). It also compare String based upon there value, and can be used to sort String alphabetically, if they are stored in List using Collections. Java - String compareTo() Method. order. Sort Strings. Constructing list of names. In the given program, all strings are given as input from the console; and after sorting, all strings are printed into the console for verifying the sorting behavior. It creates a different string variable since String is immutable in Java. Here compareTo() function is used to sort string in an alphabetical order in java.. We can sort the vector using our own comparator function to sort the strings in alphabetical order. In this Java example, we will learn how to sort the characters of a string alphabetically in different ways. For that, we will use the String class compareTo() method.. compareTo() in Java. Java does not have a direct method to sort a string. According to compareTo() function a string is less than another if it comes before the other in dictionary order and a string is greater than another if it comes after the other in dictionary . Convert the given string to a character array using the toCharArray() method.. Advertisements.