How do you compare two version Strings in Java?

Question

Is there a standard idiom for comparing version numbers? I can't just use a straight String compareTo because I don't know yet what the maximum number of point releases there will be. I need to compare the versions and have the following hold true:

1.0 < 1.1
1.0.1 < 1.1
1.9 < 1.10

Answer 1

You need to normalise the version strings so they can be compared. Something like

import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String... args) {
        compare("1.0", "1.1");
        compare("1.0.1", "1.1");
        compare("1.9", "1.10");
        compare("1.a", "1.9");
    }

    private static void compare(String v1, String v2) {
        String s1 = normalisedVersion(v1);
        String s2 = normalisedVersion(v2);
        int cmp = s1.compareTo(s2);
        String cmpStr = cmp < 0 ? "<" : cmp > 0 ? ">" : "==";
        System.out.printf("'%s' %s '%s'%n", v1, cmpStr, v2);
    }

    public static String normalisedVersion(String version) {
        return normalisedVersion(version, ".", 4);
    }

    public static String normalisedVersion(String version, String sep, int maxWidth) {
        String[] split = Pattern.compile(sep, Pattern.LITERAL).split(version);
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        for (String s : split) {
            sb.append(String.format("%" + maxWidth + 's', s));
        }
        return sb.toString();
    }
}

Prints

'1.0' < '1.1'
'1.0.1' < '1.1'
'1.9' < '1.10'
'1.a' > '1.9'

Answer 2

The best to reuse existing code, take Maven's ComparableVersion class

advantages:

• Apache License, Version 2.0,
• tested,
• used (copied) in multiple projects like spring-security-core, jboss etc
• multiple features
• it's already a java.lang.Comparable
• just copy-paste that one class, no third-party dependencies

Don't include dependency to maven-artifact as that will pull various transitive dependencies

Answer 3

Tokenize the strings with the dot as delimiter and then compare the integer translation side by side, beginning from the left.

Answer 4

Wrote a little function myself.Simpler Using Lists

 public static boolean checkVersionUpdate(String olderVerison, String newVersion) {
        if (olderVerison.length() == 0 || newVersion.length() == 0) {
            return false;
        }
        List<String> newVerList = Arrays.asList(newVersion.split("\\."));
        List<String> oldVerList = Arrays.asList(olderVerison.split("\\."));

        int diff = newVerList.size() - oldVerList.size();
        List<String> newList = new ArrayList<>();
        if (diff > 0) {
            newList.addAll(oldVerList);
            for (int i = 0; i < diff; i++) {
                newList.add("0");
            }
            return examineArray(newList, newVerList, diff);
        } else if (diff < 0) {
            newList.addAll(newVerList);
            for (int i = 0; i < -diff; i++) {
                newList.add("0");
            }
            return examineArray(oldVerList, newList, diff);
        } else {
            return examineArray(oldVerList, newVerList, diff);
        }

    }

    public static boolean examineArray(List<String> oldList, List<String> newList, int diff) {
        boolean newVersionGreater = false;
        for (int i = 0; i < oldList.size(); i++) {
            if (Integer.parseInt(newList.get(i)) > Integer.parseInt(oldList.get(i))) {
                newVersionGreater = true;
                break;
            } else if (Integer.parseInt(newList.get(i)) < Integer.parseInt(oldList.get(i))) {
                newVersionGreater = false;
                break;
            } else {
                newVersionGreater = diff > 0;
            }
        }

        return newVersionGreater;
    }

Answer 5

I created simple utility for comparing versions on Android platform using Semantic Versioning convention. So it works only for strings in format X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch) where X, Y, and Z are non-negative integers. You can find it on my GitHub.

Method Version.compareVersions(String v1, String v2) compares two version strings. It returns 0 if the versions are equal, 1 if version v1 is before version v2, -1 if version v1 is after version v2, -2 if version format is invalid.

Answer 6

It's really easy using Maven:

import org.apache.maven.artifact.versioning.DefaultArtifactVersion;

DefaultArtifactVersion minVersion = new DefaultArtifactVersion("1.0.1");
DefaultArtifactVersion maxVersion = new DefaultArtifactVersion("1.10");

DefaultArtifactVersion version = new DefaultArtifactVersion("1.11");

if (version.compareTo(minVersion) < 0 || version.compareTo(maxVersion) > 0) {
    System.out.println("Sorry, your version is unsupported");
}

You can get the right dependency string for Maven Artifact from this page:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.maven</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-artifact</artifactId>
<version>3.0.3</version>
</dependency>