Nice general way to sort nulls to the bottom, regardless?

Question

I'm writing some custom Comparators, and I'd like them to push null items to the bottom of the list, regardless of whether I'm sorting ascending or descending. What's a good strategy or pattern for approaching this?

Offhand:

• simply write separate ascending and descending comparators, sharing code where possible;
• delegate null handling to another class, either by throwing an NPE or by calling it explicitly;
• include an ascending flag and put conditional logic in it to navigate around the nulls.
• Wrap regular comparators in a null-handling class

Any others? I'd like to hear about any experiences with different approaches, any pitfalls for the various strategies.

Answer 1

The last option appeals to me a lot. Comparators are really great to chain together. In particular you may well want to write a ReverseComparator as well as a NullWrappingComparator.

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EDIT: You don't have to write this yourself. If you look at the Ordering class in the Google Collections Library you'll find this and all kinds of other goodies :)

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EDIT: Going into more detail to show what I mean about ReverseComparator...

One word of warning - in the implementation of a ReverseComparator, reverse the order of the arguments instead of negating the result, as otherwise Integer.MIN_VALUE is "reversed" to itself.

So this implementation is wrong (assuming original is the comparator to reverse):

public int compare(T x, T y)
{
    return -original.compare(x, y);
}

but this is right:

public int compare(T x, T y)
{
    return original.compare(y, x);
}

The reason is that we always want to reverse the comparison, but if original.compare(x, y) returns int.MIN_VALUE, then the bad comparer will also return int.MIN_VALUE, which is incorrect. This is due to the funny property that int.MIN_VALUE == -int.MIN_VALUE.

Answer 2

I agree with Jon Skeet (it's so easy :). I tried to implement a very simple decorator:

class NullComparators {

    static <T> Comparator<T> atEnd(final Comparator<T> comparator) {
        return new Comparator<T>() {

            public int compare(T o1, T o2) {
                if (o1 == null && o2 == null) {
                    return 0;
                }

                if (o1 == null) {
                    return 1;
                }

                if (o2 == null) {
                    return -1;
                }

                return comparator.compare(o1, o2);
            }
        };
    }

    static <T> Comparator<T> atBeginning(final Comparator<T> comparator) {
        return Collections.reverseOrder(atEnd(comparator));
    }
}

given a Comparator:

Comparator<String> wrapMe = new Comparator<String>() {
      public int compare(String o1, String o2) {
          return o1.compareTo(o2);
      }
};

and some test data:

List<String> strings = Arrays.asList(null, "aaa", null, "bbb", "ccc", null);

you can sort with nulls at end:

Collections.sort(strings, NullComparators.atEnd(wrapMe));

[aaa, bbb, ccc, null, null, null]

or at beginning:

Collections.sort(strings, NullComparators.atBeginning(wrapMe));

[null, null, null, ccc, bbb, aaa]

Answer 3

Following up on dfa's answer - what I want is that the nulls sort at the end without affecting the order of the non-nulls. So I want something more along the lines of this:

public class NullComparatorsTest extends TestCase {
    Comparator<String> forward = new Comparator<String>() {
            public int compare(String a, String b) {
             return a.compareTo(b);
            }
           };

    public void testIt() throws Exception {
     List<String> strings = Arrays.asList(null, "aaa", null, "bbb", "ccc", null);
     Collections.sort(strings, NullComparators.atEnd(forward));
     assertEquals("[aaa, bbb, ccc, null, null, null]", strings.toString());
     Collections.sort(strings, NullComparators.atBeginning(forward));
     assertEquals("[null, null, null, aaa, bbb, ccc]", strings.toString());
    }
}

public class NullComparators {
    public static <T> Comparator<T> atEnd(final Comparator<T> comparator) {
     return new Comparator<T>() {
      public int compare(T a, T b) {
       if (a == null && b == null)
        return 0;
       if (a == null)
        return 1;
       if (b == null)
        return -1;
       return comparator.compare(a, b);
      }
     };
    }

    public static <T> Comparator<T> atBeginning(final Comparator<T> comparator) {
     return new Comparator<T>() {
      public int compare(T a, T b) {
       if (a == null && b == null)
        return 0;
       if (a == null)
        return -1;
       if (b == null)
        return 1;
       return comparator.compare(a, b);
      }
     };
    }
}

Full credit to dfa, though - this is just a minor modification of his work.

Answer 4

You could always use NullComparator from commons-collections. It's been around longer than Google Collections.