alphabetizing lists

[Mario Bonassin]

I have no idea how to do this one. I need a simple code that will take a listModel and alphabetize the items. I would like it if it could do it with the first letter and last letter, seperatly of course.
Any suggestions or advise would be great.
Mario

[sever oon]

You'll want to use java.util.Comparator and java.lang.Comparable. You can write a comparator to sort a java Collection in any way you see fit. You can also use the Comparator to instantiate sorted collections so you don't have to sort things all at once, they get inserted into their sorted positions at the time of insertion. Or, many classes already implement the Comparable interface so they have a "natural ordering". Strings have this capability already...

List items = new LinkedList();
items.add( "apple" );
items.add( "book" );
items.add( "cat" );
Collections.sort( items );
// items is now sorted
Collections.sort( items, Collections.reverseOrder() );
// items is now in reverse order
Collections.sort( items, String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER );
// items sorted case-insensitively
// let's make a Comparator that reverses the Strings and sorts them
final boolean ignoreCase = false;
Comparator alphByLast = new Comparator() {
  public int compare( Object o1, Object o2 ) {
    int comparison = 0;
    if( o1 instanceof String  &&  o2 instanceof String ) {
      String s1 = reverseString( (String) o1 );
      String s2 = reverseString( (String) o2 );
      comparison = ignoreCase? s1.compareToIgnoreCase( s2 ) : s1.compareTo( s2 );
    }
    else {
      throw new Exception( "cannot compare non-Strings" );
    }
    return comparison;
  }
  // you should implement this properly, but for this particular usage it doesn't matter
  public boolean equals( Object o ) { return false; }
  public String reverseString( String s ) {
    char[] c = s.toCharArray();
    int halfLength = c.length/2;
    for( int i=0; i < halfLength; i++ ) {
      char i = c[i];
      c[i] = c[halfLength - i];
    }
    return new String( c );
  }
};
Collections.sort( items, alphByLast );
// items now sorted by last char to front

sev