Sorting a String Array

[gemacjr1201]

My assignment is to write a program that accepts up to 10 names and corresponding birthdates. The array will be First name, Last name, and birthdate. Then allow the user to sort the list by first name or last name.

I need help on how to start. I know to use a for loop, but how do I begin the first String array assigned to first name, then last name, and then birthdate.

I am not asking for code, just some direction.

[0][1][2][3][4] [5][6][7][8] [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]
list[0] [F][i][R][S][T] [L][A][S][T] [M][M][/][D][D][/][Y][Y][Y][Y]

[DeMan]

One approach might be:

1)Define a class/object that has a first name, last name and birthday.
2)Define a function (for this object) to compare to another object based on first name, then another function to compare based on last name -> ideally, pass in an object, check for non-NULL, check that the class passed in is correct, and then return different values based on difference (a common approach is to return negative numbers if the current object is before the passed in one (alphabetically), 0 if they are the same and positive otherwise.
3)Define methods that can be used to sort objects based on the return value from these functions.
4) (if you wanted to) define a method that can be called to decide whether to sort by first or last.


You can define a comparator (that conforms to the positive, negative 0 principal above), and allows you to call Array.sort() to sort the elements, but I'm not sure how you would do this to allow selection between different comparator functions (you might like to have a look at the java api -> Search Comparator)

Hope that helps in some small way....