Deep compare sets in Java

Question

I have two sets in Java that compare Item objects. Is there a method to compare the sets so that Item's equals method is invoked and not just compare references?

Answer 1

Each child of AbstractSet does that. See the docs

public boolean equals(Object o)

Compares the specified object with this set for equality. Returns true if the given object is also a set, the two sets have the same size, and every member of the given set is contained in this set. This ensures that the equals method works properly across different implementations of the Set interface. This implementation first checks if the specified object is this set; if so it returns true. Then, it checks if the specified object is a set whose size is identical to the size of this set; if not, it returns false. If so, it returns containsAll((Collection) o).

So in fact this relies on the contains implementation (which is invoked by containsAll(..)). For HashSet (at least) this is what you are looking for.

Answer 2

This is the default behaviour, if it's not what you're seeing then check that you're overriding hashCode as well. See the following code for an example:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    Set<Item> items1 = new HashSet<Item>();
    items1.add(new Item("item 1"));
    items1.add(new Item("item 2"));

    Set<Item> items2 = new HashSet<Item>();
    items2.add(new Item("item 1"));
    items2.add(new Item("item 2"));

    System.out.println(items1.equals(items2));
}

private static class Item {
    private String id;

    public Item(String id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        return id.hashCode();
    }

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object obj) {
        return id.equals(((Item)obj).id);
    }
} 

This outputs:

true