Sort a HashMap in Java

1. Introduction

In this quick tutorial, we’ll learn how to sort a HashMap in Java.

More specifically, we’ll look at sorting HashMap entries by their key or value using:

• TreeMap
• ArrayList and Collections.sort()
• TreeSet
• Using the Stream API
• Using the Guava library

2. Using a TreeMap

As we know, keys in TreeMap are sorted using their natural order. This is a good solution when we want to sort the key-value pairs by their key. So the idea is to push all the data from our HashMap into the TreeMap.

To start, let’s define a HashMap and initialize it with some data:

Map<String, Employee> map = new HashMap<>();

Employee employee1 = new Employee(1L, "Mher");
map.put(employee1.getName(), employee1);
Employee employee2 = new Employee(22L, "Annie");
map.put(employee2.getName(), employee2);
Employee employee3 = new Employee(8L, "John");
map.put(employee3.getName(), employee3);
Employee employee4 = new Employee(2L, "George");
map.put(employee4.getName(), employee4);

For the Employee class, note that we implemented Comparable:

public class Employee implements Comparable<Employee> {

    private Long id;
    private String name;

    // constructor, getters, setters

    // override equals and hashCode
    @Override
    public int compareTo(Employee employee) {
        return (int)(this.id - employee.getId());
    }
}

Next, we store the entries in the TreeMap by using its constructor:

TreeMap<String, Employee> sorted = new TreeMap<>(map);

We can also use the putAll method to copy the data:

TreeMap<String, Employee> sorted = new TreeMap<>();
sorted.putAll(map);

And that’s it! To make sure our map entries are sorted by key, let’s print them out:

Annie=Employee{id=22, name='Annie'}
George=Employee{id=2, name='George'}
John=Employee{id=8, name='John'}
Mher=Employee{id=1, name='Mher'}

As we can see, the keys are sorted in natural order.

3. Using ArrayList

Of course, we can sort the entries of the map with the help of ArrayList. The key difference from the previous method is that we don’t maintain the Map interface here.

3.1. Sort by Key

Let’s load the key set into an ArrayList:

List<String> employeeByKey = new ArrayList<>(map.keySet());
Collections.sort(employeeByKey);

And the output is:

[Annie, George, John, Mher]

3.2. Sort by Value

Now, what if we want to sort our map values by the id field of the Employee object? We can use an ArrayList for that, too.

First, let’s copy the values into the list:

List<Employee> employeeById = new ArrayList<>(map.values());

Then we sort it:

Collections.sort(employeeById);

Remember that this works because Employee implements the Comparable interface. Otherwise, we’d need to define a manual comparator for our call to Collections.sort.

To check the results, we print the employeeById:

[Employee{id=1, name='Mher'}, 
Employee{id=2, name='George'}, 
Employee{id=8, name='John'}, 
Employee{id=22, name='Annie'}]

As we can see, the objects are sorted by their id field.

4. Using a TreeSet 

If we don’t want to accept duplicate values in our sorted collection, there’s a nice solution with TreeSet.

First, let’s add some duplicate entries to our initial map:

Employee employee5 = new Employee(1L, "Mher");
map.put(employee5.getName(), employee5);
Employee employee6 = new Employee(22L, "Annie");
map.put(employee6.getName(), employee6);

4.1. Sort by Key

To sort the map by its key entries:

SortedSet<String> keySet = new TreeSet<>(map.keySet());

Let’s print the keySet and see the output:

[Annie, George, John, Mher]

Now we have the map keys sorted without the duplicates.

4.2. Sort by Value

Likewise, for the map values, the conversion code looks like:

SortedSet<Employee> values = new TreeSet<>(map.values());

And the results are:

[Employee{id=1, name='Mher'}, 
Employee{id=2, name='George'}, 
Employee{id=8, name='John'}, 
Employee{id=22, name='Annie'}]

As we can see, there are no duplicates in the output. This works with custom objects when we override equals and hashCode.

5. Using Lambdas and Streams

Since Java 8, we can use the Stream API and lambda expressions to sort the map. All we need is to call the sorted method over the map’s stream pipeline.

5.1. Sort by Key

To sort by key, we use the comparingByKey comparator:

map.entrySet()
  .stream()
  .sorted(Map.Entry.<String, Employee>comparingByKey())
  .forEach(System.out::println);

The final forEach stage prints out the results:

Annie=Employee{id=22, name='Annie'}
George=Employee{id=2, name='George'}
John=Employee{id=8, name='John'}
Mher=Employee{id=1, name='Mher'}

By default, the sorting mode is ascending.

5.2. Sort by Value

Of course, we can sort by the Employee objects as well:

map.entrySet()
  .stream()
  .sorted(Map.Entry.comparingByValue())
  .forEach(System.out::println);

As we can see, the code above prints out a map sorted by the id fields of the Employee objects:

Mher=Employee{id=1, name='Mher'}
George=Employee{id=2, name='George'}
John=Employee{id=8, name='John'}
Annie=Employee{id=22, name='Annie'}

Additionally, we can collect the results into a new map:

Map<String, Employee> result = map.entrySet()
  .stream()
  .sorted(Map.Entry.comparingByValue())
  .collect(Collectors.toMap(
    Map.Entry::getKey, 
    Map.Entry::getValue, 
    (oldValue, newValue) -> oldValue, LinkedHashMap::new));

Note that we collected our results into a LinkedHashMap. By default, Collectors.toMap returns a new HashMap, but as we know, HashMap doesn’t guarantee insertion order, while LinkedHashMap does.

6. Using Guava

Lastly, a library that allows us to sort the HashMap is Guava. Before we begin, it’ll be useful to check our write-up about maps in Guava.

First, let’s declare an Ordering, as we want to sort our map by the Employee’s Id field:

Ordering naturalOrdering = Ordering.natural()
  .onResultOf(Functions.forMap(map, null));

Now all we need is to use ImmutableSortedMap to illustrate the results:

ImmutableSortedMap.copyOf(map, naturalOrdering);

And once again, the output is a map ordered by the id field:

Mher=Employee{id=1, name='Mher'}
George=Employee{id=2, name='George'}
John=Employee{id=8, name='John'}
Annie=Employee{id=22, name='Annie'}

7. Summary

In this article, we reviewed a number of ways to sort a HashMap by key or value.

We also learned how to do this by implementing Comparable when the attribute is a custom class.