Sorting multi-type string ArrayList in Java based on Integers

Question

I have a data Set like this:

1,JOHN,1934
2,TERENCE,1914
3,JOHN,1964
4,JOHN,1904
5,JOHN,1924
6,JOHN,1954
7,JOHN,1944
8,JOHN,1984
9,JOHN,1974
10,JOHN,1994

Which I've loaded in ArrayList of String[] from Text file like this:

ArrayList<String[]> records = new ArrayList<>();
String fileLocation = System.getProperty("user.dir");
String dataPath = fileLocation + File.separator + "boys-names.txt";
try {
    try (BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(dataPath))) {
        String line;
        while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
            String[] values = line.split(",");
            records.add(values);
        }
    }
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

I wanted to sort data set in increasing year like this:

4,JOHN,1904
2,TERENCE,1914
5,JOHN,1924
1,JOHN,1934
7,JOHN,1944
6,JOHN,1954
3,JOHN,1964
9,JOHN,1974
8,JOHN,1984
10,JOHN,1994

Problem: The built-in sorting method Collections.sort(list); of ArrayList only works on single type of data. But, in my case I have string with multi-type (string-integer) and sorting should base in Integers. So, is there any way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Consider defining a model class for your data - let's call it MyData :

public class MyData {
    private long id;
    private String name;
    private Year year;

    //getters setters constructor
}

If the last integer value represents a year, why not use java.time.Year directly? And then you could sort this list using List::sort method and passing a comparator :

Comparator<MyData> comparator = Comparator.comparing(MyData::getYear);

myDataList.sort(comparator);