Java 6 Illuminated: An Active Learning Approach, 2nd Edition

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The compareTo method of

the String class is discussed

in detail in Chapter 5.

REFERENCE POINT

8.6 Searching and Sorting Arrays 525

8.6.4 Sorting Arrays of Objects

We saw earlier in the chapter that data items to be sorted can be primitive

data types, such as integers or doubles. But they can also be objects. With an

array of objects, it is important to understand that we need to sort the

objects themselves, not the array elements, which are merely the object ref-

erences, or memory locations of the objects.

Arrays of objects are sorted using a sort key, which is one or more of the

instance variables of the objects. For instance, if we have email objects, ...