sort array list of special strings, by date

Question

I have an arrayList.

This is an arrayList of strings. The string contains a \"Date.toString\" in format of \"January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT\" +

Answer 1

I would convert this array list first to something like

public class Event {
    private Date date;
    private String description;
    ...
}

After that, create a comparator to compare 2 events like this:

public class EventComparator implements Comparator{
    public int compare(Event e1, Event e2) {
        return e1.getDate().compareTo(e2.getDate());
    }
}

This will save you tons of performance compared with (pardon me) parsing each string for each comparison.