Cracking the Coding Interview, 4 Edition - 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions

Solutions to Chapter 9 | Sorting and Searching
9.2 Write a method to sort an array of strings so that all the anagrams are next to each
other.
SOLUTION
pg 66
The basic idea is to implement a normal sorting algorithm where you override the compareTo
method to compare the “signature” of each string. In this case, the signature is the
alphabetically sorted string.
1 public class AnagramComparator implements Comparator {
2 public String sortChars(String s) {
3 char[] content = s.toCharArray();
4 Arrays.sort(content);
5 return new String(content);
6 }
7
8 public int compare(String s1, String s2) {
9 return sortChars(s1).compareTo(sortChars(s2));
10 }
11 }
Now, just sort the arrays, using this compareTo method instead of the usual one.
12 Arrays.sort(array, new AnagramComparator());
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