Java: Sort a list of words by length, then by alphabetical order

Question

I am told to have a list of words sorted by length, and those that have the same length are sorted by alphabetical order. This is what I have for the method that does that s

Answer 1

By far the easiest and best way is to write a custom comparator as other answers say.

But to do it a similar way you were attempting would be to make the length the key and rather then having a single string as the value have a list of all the words of that length. So a map of the form

Map>

You could then call the key of any length and return a sorted list of words like this

Collections.sort(yourMap.get(theLength))

BUT far more complicated then just using a comparator