Sort on a string that may contain a number

Question

I need to write a Java Comparator class that compares Strings, however with one twist. If the two strings it is comparing are the same at the beginning and end of the strin

Answer 1

The Alphanum algrothim is nice, but it did not match requirements for a project I'm working on. I need to be able to sort negative numbers and decimals correctly. Here is the implementation I came up. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

public class StringAsNumberComparator implements Comparator {

    public static final Pattern NUMBER_PATTERN = Pattern.compile("(\\-?\\d+\\.\\d+)|(\\-?\\.\\d+)|(\\-?\\d+)");

    /**
     * Splits strings into parts sorting each instance of a number as a number if there is
     * a matching number in the other String.
     * 
     * For example A1B, A2B, A11B, A11B1, A11B2, A11B11 will be sorted in that order instead
     * of alphabetically which will sort A1B and A11B together.
     */
    public int compare(String str1, String str2) {
        if(str1 == str2) return 0;
        else if(str1 == null) return 1;
        else if(str2 == null) return -1;

        List split1 = split(str1);
        List split2 = split(str2);
        int diff = 0;

        for(int i = 0; diff == 0 && i < split1.size() && i < split2.size(); i++) {
            String token1 = split1.get(i);
            String token2 = split2.get(i);

            if((NUMBER_PATTERN.matcher(token1).matches() && NUMBER_PATTERN.matcher(token2).matches()) {
                diff = (int) Math.signum(Double.parseDouble(token1) - Double.parseDouble(token2));
            } else {
                diff = token1.compareToIgnoreCase(token2);
            }
        }
        if(diff != 0) {
            return diff;
        } else {
            return split1.size() - split2.size();
        }
    }

    /**
     * Splits a string into strings and number tokens.
     */
    private List split(String s) {
        List list = new ArrayList();
        try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(s)) {
            int index = 0;
            String num = null;
            while ((num = scanner.findInLine(NUMBER_PATTERN)) != null) {
                int indexOfNumber = s.indexOf(num, index);
                if (indexOfNumber > index) {
                    list.add(s.substring(index, indexOfNumber));
                }
                list.add(num);
                index = indexOfNumber + num.length();
            }
            if (index < s.length()) {
                list.add(s.substring(index));
            }
        }
        return list;
    }
}

PS. I wanted to use the java.lang.String.split() method and use "lookahead/lookbehind" to keep the tokens, but I could not get it to work with the regular expression I was using.