Renewed Comparator: Everything You Should Know

Introduction to the Comparator interface

Comparator is an interface that is used to define how a collection must be sorted. In Java 7, it had just 2 methods – compare() and equals(). The enhanced Comparator in Java 8 now has 19 methods. However, the Comparator is still a functional interface as it has only one abstract method, i.e., compare(). Comparator now supports declarations via lambda expressions as it is a Functional Interface. We saw this in our lambda expressions chapter as well. Below is the list of methods in the Comparator interface.