Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

Arrays

Synopsis

This class defines static methods for sorting, searching, and performing other useful operations on arrays. It also defines the asList( ) method, which returns a List wrapper around a specified array of objects. Any changes made to the List are also made to the underlying array. This is a powerful method that allows any array of objects to be manipulated in any of the ways a List can be manipulated. It provides a link between arrays and the Java collections framework.

The various sort( ) methods sort an array (or a specified portion of an array) in place. Variants of the method are defined for arrays of each primitive type and for arrays of Object. For arrays of primitive types, the sorting is done according to the natural ordering of the type. For arrays of objects, the sorting is done according to the specified Comparator, or, if the array contains only java.lang.Comparable objects, according to the ordering defined by that interface. When sorting an array of objects, a stable sorting algorithm is used so that the relative ordering of equal objects is not disturbed. (This allows repeated sorts to order objects by key and subkey, for example.)

The binarySearch( ) methods perform an efficient search (in logarithmic time) of a sorted array for a specified value. If a match is found in the array, binarySearch( ) returns the index of the match. If no match is found, the method returns a negative number. For a negative return value r, the index -(r+1) specifies ...