Sorting problem PLZ Hellp Me

Question

hi all
i had a problem to be solved but i am unable to get any idea on it
my problem is
i had some directiories with names as MONYEAR
i.e JAN2004,SEP2004,AUG2004 ,JUL2004 etc.............
these dirs are created programetically for storing that perticular months files in that dir only
now my problem is
i wan to dislay these DIRs in a sorted order according to MONYEAR order ie JAN2004,JUL2004,AUG2004,SEP2004 like that
i had no idea how to do it in a simple way
i was new to java
anybody could PLZ help me how to do it
if so plz provide me some sample code
thanks all

Answer 1

here's a 'novel' approach
import java.util.*;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
class FolderDateSort
  public FolderDateSort()
    ArrayList folderName = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList(new String[]{
      "MAR2004","JAN2004","AUG2004","DEC2004","FEB2004","MAR2003","SEP2004"}));
    Comparator comp = new MyComparator();
    Collections.sort(folderName,comp);
    for(int x = 0; x < folderName.size(); x++)System.out.println(folderName.get(x));
  public static void main(String[] args){new FolderDateSort();}
class MyComparator implements Comparator
  public int compare(Object o1, Object o2)
    SimpleDateFormat sdf1 = new SimpleDateFormat("MMMyyyy");
    SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMM");
    Calendar cal1 = Calendar.getInstance();
    Calendar cal2 = Calendar.getInstance();
    try
      cal1.setTime(sdf1.parse((String)o1));
      cal2.setTime(sdf1.parse((String)o2));
    catch(Exception e){e.printStackTrace();}
    return (sdf2.format(cal1.getTime())).compareTo(sdf2.format(cal2.getTime()));
}