How to list files in alphabetical order?

1. Introduction

In this short article, we are going to present how to get a list of files in alphabetical order in Java.

2. Sort file list using the sorted method from JDK 8

To print files in alphabetical order first we need to list all the files from specified directory. In the following example, we presented a method provided in JDK 8 Files.list(...).

package com.frontbackend.java.io.list;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

public class ListFilesInAlphabeticalOrder {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        Files.list(Paths.get("/tmp"))
             .sorted()
             .forEach(System.out::println);
    }
}

This approach works, because Path is a Comparable class, which by default sorts pathnames lexicographically

3. Conclusion

In this practical tutorial, we presented how to sort a list of files in Java alphabetically. Always the first step is to get a list of files in any format (Array, List, Stream). Then we sort that collection using known Java mechanism.