what is natural order ?

[gk]

TreeSet maintains its elements in their natural order, hence iterating
will produce "Apple Banana Cricket " instead of "Apple Cricket Banana"


what is natural order in the above ?

does it want to say, treeset always sorts automatically by
ALPHABATICALLY ?

 

[Manish Pandit]

TreeSet maintains its elements in their natural order, hence iterating
will produce "Apple Banana Cricket " instead of "Apple Cricket Banana"


what is natural order in the above ?

does it want to say, treeset always sorts automatically by
ALPHABATICALLY ?

Yes, in this case - as it contains strings. String implements
comparable, which offers natural ordering. In case of strings, the
natural ordering implies alphabetical sorting. You might want to take a
look at Comparable Interface for more information on this.

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/Comparable.html

-cheers,
Manish

 

[Eric Sosman]

TreeSet maintains its elements in their natural order, hence iterating
will produce "Apple Banana Cricket " instead of "Apple Cricket Banana"


what is natural order in the above ?

does it want to say, treeset always sorts automatically by
ALPHABATICALLY ?

Yes, in this case - as it contains strings. String implements
comparable, which offers natural ordering. In case of strings, the
natural ordering implies alphabetical sorting. [...]

Almost. The natural ordering for String objects is their
lexicographic order according to the Unicode values of their
individual characters, so (for example) "Aïda" comes after
"Axolotl". For an even more blatant violation of alphabetical
order, note that "Zebra" precedes "aardvark".

Also, "alphabetical order" varies from place to place, even
if you consider only languages written in Latin alphabets. As
far as I know (I'm no expert on this, just someone who once got
a bit of a scolding from a person who was), everybody agrees on
the ordering of the twenty-six unaccented letters, but the
treatment of accented letters is subject to national and linguistic
variation.

See also java.text.Collator and allied classes.

 

[Oliver Wong]

TreeSet maintains its elements in their natural order, hence iterating
will produce "Apple Banana Cricket " instead of "Apple Cricket Banana"


what is natural order in the above ?

It might be clearer to talk about what is NOT natural order.

In some cases, you can provide a sorting algorithm with a comparator.
The comparator defines an ordering. For example, you might create a
Comparator<Integer> which orders all odd integers before all even integers,
so that the the order of {1,2,3,4,5} would be: (1,3,5,2,4). In other words,
by using a Comparator, you can invent any kind of ordering you want.

When you DON'T use a comparator, it implies you want the natural
ordering of the elements, instead of your custom ordering.

- Oliver

 

[Mark Rafn]

TreeSet maintains its elements in their natural order, hence iterating
will produce "Apple Banana Cricket " instead of "Apple Cricket Banana"

Natural order is the ordering provided by the compareTo() methods
of the elements in the collection (all of which must implement Comparable).

For String, this is asciibetical (more specifically, compared according to the
unicode value of each character).

what is natural order in the above ?

"Apple Banana Cricket".

does it want to say, treeset always sorts automatically by
ALPHABATICALLY ?

No. TreeSet can store Comparable objects other than String. Each class
defines it's own natural ordering in the compareTo() method. And further, no.
String's natural ordering is not alphabetical, it's based on character values,
meaning that if you have mixed upper and lowercase, you'd get "Banana apple
cricket".

If you want some other sort order, you need to instantiate the TreeMap with a
Comparator that does what you want. The String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER
Comparator is handy

 

[Chris Uppal]

Almost. The natural ordering for String objects is their
lexicographic order according to the Unicode values of their
individual characters, so (for example) "Aïda" comes after
"Axolotl". For an even more blatant violation of alphabetical
order, note that "Zebra" precedes "aardvark".

All true, and undoubtedly all that the OP needs to know.

But it may be (midly) interesting to note that -- although String /claim/ to
sort lexicographically according to the Unicode code points -- they /actually/
sort by the UTF-16 values. And that doesn't produce the same sort order for
Unicode characters outside the 16-bit range.

Also, "alphabetical order" varies from place to place, even
if you consider only languages written in Latin alphabets. As
far as I know (I'm no expert on this, just someone who once got
a bit of a scolding from a person who was), everybody agrees on
the ordering of the twenty-six unaccented letters,

For interest: there are exceptions. Or at least, there are according to the
Unicode people. Spanish (they say) traditionally considers ll to be a digraph
falling between l and m.

-- chris

 

[Tom Forsmo]

Almost. The natural ordering for String objects is their
lexicographic order according to the Unicode values of their
individual characters, so (for example) "Aïda" comes after
"Axolotl". For an even more blatant violation of alphabetical
order, note that "Zebra" precedes "aardvark".

I have allways though of natural ordering as the way we humans would
order strings, e.g.

string1
string2
string...
string9
string10
string11
..
string20
string21

and other similar sort order, instead of the typical

string1
string10
string11
...
string2
string20
string21

etc and other similar types of sorting problems

Is there a name for the "human sort order"? and does there exists an
implementation of it. Perhaps a name could be "semantic sort order".
I realise that it would require quite a big implementation with many
special case rules that in no way can be generalised and made into a
single algorithm like lexical or natural orders.

tom

 

[Oliver Wong]

I have allways though of natural ordering as the way we humans would order
strings, e.g.

string1
string2
string...
string9
string10
string11
..
string20
string21

Is there a name for the "human sort order"? and does there exists an
implementation of it. Perhaps a name could be "semantic sort order".
I realise that it would require quite a big implementation with many
special case rules that in no way can be generalised and made into a
single algorithm like lexical or natural orders.

There may be a name for the particular sorting you've shown above
(though the sort order is ambiguous, because there are some corner cases you
haven't demonstrated in that example), but I doubt that there exists a
"human sort order", as different humans are likely to sort things in
different orders.

See Chris' post about how a Spanish speaking person would likely sort
strings in different order than an English speaking person, for example.

- Oliver

 

[Eric Sosman]

Tom Forsmo wrote On 11/03/06 15:59,:

I have allways though of natural ordering as the way we humans would
order strings, e.g.

string1
string2
string...
string9
string10
string11
..
string20
string21

and other similar sort order, instead of the typical

string1
string10
string11
...
string2
string20
string21

etc and other similar types of sorting problems

Is there a name for the "human sort order"? and does there exists an
implementation of it. Perhaps a name could be "semantic sort order".
I realise that it would require quite a big implementation with many
special case rules that in no way can be generalised and made into a
single algorithm like lexical or natural orders.

You might be interested in

http://sourcefrog.net/projects/natsort/

(Yes, that's "frog" as in "Kermit.")