Sorting maps in Java based on it’s values

Ever needed to sort a Map type collection in Java ?

Update: how do to this with generics?

Well i had to the other day and of course all the documentation pointed me in the direction of the SortedMap interface.

However, this datastructure is sorted on its keys and not on its values, which was really what I wanted to accomplish, so how do you do that? After a bit of fiddeling I found something that worked. Maybe its useful to you:

public class MapValueSort {
	
	/** inner class to do soring of the map **/
	private static class ValueComparer implements Comparator {
		private Map  _data = null;
		public ValueComparer (Map data){
			super();
			_data = data;
		}
		
         public int compare(Object o1, Object o2) {
        	 String e1 = (String) _data.get(o1);
             String e2 = (String) _data.get(o2);
             return e1.compareTo(e2);
         }
	}

	public static void main(String[] args){
		
		Map unsortedData = new HashMap();
		unsortedData.put("2", "DEF");
		unsortedData.put("1", "ABC");
		unsortedData.put("4", "ZXY");
		unsortedData.put("3", "BCD");
		
		
		SortedMap sortedData = new TreeMap(new MapValueSort.ValueComparer(unsortedData));
		
		printMap(unsortedData);
		
		sortedData.putAll(unsortedData);
		System.out.println();
		printMap(sortedData);
	}

	private static void printMap(Map data) {
		for (Iterator iter = data.keySet().iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
			String key = (String) iter.next();
			System.out.println("Value/key:"+data.get(key)+"/"+key);
		}
	}
	
}

This should output something of the lines of:

Value/key:BCD/3
Value/key:DEF/2
Value/key:ZXY/4
Value/key:ABC/1

Value/key:ABC/1
Value/key:BCD/3
Value/key:DEF/2
Value/key:ZXY/4

Where the bottom last four lines obviously is sorted on the map’s values and not it’s keys.