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If your application audience is limited to people who speak English,
you can probably perform string comparisons with the
String.compareTo method. The
String.compareTo method performs a binary comparison of
the Unicode characters within the two strings. For most languages,
however, this binary comparison cannot be relied on to sort strings,
because the Unicode values do not correspond to the relative order of
the characters.
Fortunately the
Collator class allows your application to perform string comparisons for
different languages. In this section, you'll learn how to use the
Collator class when sorting text.
Collation rules define the sort sequence of strings.
These rules vary with locale,
because various natural languages sort words differently.
Using the predefined collation rules provided by the
Collator class, you can sort strings
in a locale-independent manner.
In some cases, the predefined collation rules provided by
the Collator class may not work for you.
For example, you may want to sort strings in
a language whose locale is not supported
by Collator.
In this situation,
you can define your own collation rules, and assign them
to a RuleBasedCollator object.
With the CollationKey class,
you may
increase the efficiency of string comparisons.
This class converts String objects to sort keys that
follow the rules of a given Collator.
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