[java] How do I use a PriorityQueue?

As an alternative to using Comparator, you can also have the class you're using in your PriorityQueue implement Comparable (and correspondingly override the compareTo method).

Note that it's generally best to only use Comparable instead of Comparator if that ordering is the intuitive ordering of the object - if, for example, you have a use case to sort Person objects by age, it's probably best to just use Comparator instead.

import java.lang.Comparable;
import java.util.PriorityQueue;

class Test
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        PriorityQueue<MyClass> queue = new PriorityQueue<MyClass>();
        queue.add(new MyClass(2, "short"));
        queue.add(new MyClass(2, "very long indeed"));
        queue.add(new MyClass(1, "medium"));
        queue.add(new MyClass(1, "very long indeed"));
        queue.add(new MyClass(2, "medium"));
        queue.add(new MyClass(1, "short"));
        while (queue.size() != 0)
            System.out.println(queue.remove());
    }
}

class MyClass implements Comparable<MyClass>
{
    int sortFirst;
    String sortByLength;

    public MyClass(int sortFirst, String sortByLength)
    {
        this.sortFirst = sortFirst;
        this.sortByLength = sortByLength;
    }

    @Override
    public int compareTo(MyClass other)
    {
        if (sortFirst != other.sortFirst)
            return Integer.compare(sortFirst, other.sortFirst);
        else
            return Integer.compare(sortByLength.length(), other.sortByLength.length());
    }

    public String toString()
    {
        return sortFirst + ", " + sortByLength;
    }
}

Output:

1, short
1, medium
1, very long indeed
2, short
2, medium
2, very long indeed