I need to sort an array of ints using a custom comparator, but Java's library doesn't provide a sort function for ints with comparators (comparators can be used only with objects). Is there any easy way to do this?
If you can't change the type of your input array the following will work:
final int[] data = new int[] { 5, 4, 2, 1, 3 };
final Integer[] sorted = ArrayUtils.toObject(data);
Arrays.sort(sorted, new Comparator<Integer>() {
public int compare(Integer o1, Integer o2) {
// Intentional: Reverse order for this demo
return o2.compareTo(o1);
}
});
System.arraycopy(ArrayUtils.toPrimitive(sorted), 0, data, 0, sorted.length);
This uses ArrayUtils
from the commons-lang project to easily convert between int[]
and Integer[]
, creates a copy of the array, does the sort, and then copies the sorted data over the original.