A toString Comparator for arbitrary objects

I recently ran into a problem where I wanted to add objects attained by reflection to a TreeSet. In this specific case, I had a problem when a Locale object was retrieved. It could not be added to the TreeSet because it is not "Comparable." It did, however, have toString values that could be sorted intelligibly.

I decided to create a Comparator that would handle arbitrary objects, and allow them to be added to a TreeSet of type Object:

	package com.threeleaf.util;
	import java.util.Comparator;
	/**
	* A {@link Comparator} that allows any two objects to be sorted based on {@link Object#toString()}.
	* This works best when the object's toString returns something meaningful, but can still be
	* useful in cases where a object one has not control over needs to be placed in a sorted
	* collection.
	* <p>
	* Usage:
	* <pre>{@code
	* final Set<Object> set = new TreeSet<>(new ToStringComparator());
	* // en_US
	* set.add(Locale.US);
	* // en_CA
	* set.add(Locale.CANADA);
	* // en
	* set.add(Locale.ENGLISH);
	* }</pre>
	* produces the sorted set: {@code [ENGLISH, CANADA, US]} instead of an exception.
	*/
	@SuppressWarnings("WeakerAccess")
	public class ToStringComparator implements Comparator<Object>
	{
	/** Instantiate a new {@link ToStringComparator}. */
	public ToStringComparator()
	{
	super();
	}
	/** {@inheritDoc}. */
	public int compare(final Object object1, final Object object2)
	{
	return object1.toString().compareTo(object2.toString());
	}
	}

view raw ToStringComparator.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The caveat is that this works best when the object in question overrides the default toString method in a meaningful way. If the base Object.toString() method is inherited by the object, then the sorting will most likely appear random, since the method looks like this:

    public String toString() {
        return getClass().getName() + "@" + Integer.toHexString(hashCode());
    }