Given a list of IP address, how do you find min, max?

Question

In Java, i have an arrayList of ip address. how do i find the min and max ?

I have used the Collection.min() but it doesnt work given a case like :

192.168.0.1  <--min 
192.168.0.250
192.168.0.9  <--max

how do i return

192.168.0.1  <--min
192.168.0.250 <--max

instead?

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ArrayList is retrieve from the database. I would need to do this operation per tick (each tick is at 5 sec interval). The number of IP address would hit a max of probably 300.

Answer 1

Convert the IP address into a long integer, then sort it. 192.168.0.1 can be converted to an integer using binary arithmetic/operators:

( 192 << 24 ) + ( 168 << 16 ) + ( 0 << 8 ) + ( 1 << 0 )

and so on. Do read the comments below about using the correct data type.