On Jul 18, 2017 11:39 AM, "Gary Gregory" <garydgreg...@gmail.com> wrote:
My use case is to write a Properties object in sorted key order, nothing fancy. The simplest way is to subclass Properties and override keys(). Loading a SortedProperties with a Map is not on my to-do list. Would your use case be served by one or more static methods? These methods might need as arguments: 1) Some form of output sink 2) An instance of Map<?,?> m satisfying the conditions: a) every key in m is an instance of String. b) every value in m is an instance of String. The constraints 2a and 2b are required be satisfied by any Properties object any time at it is output. (Because of the legacy derivation from Hashtable, these conditions may be violated at other times without an error being signaled. This also makes the concept of a Sorted Properties instance problematic, as these keys/values may be comparable with String.) There might be different entry points for sorted output, and for output in the natural order of the map (which might be sorted). There may need to be a specialized default comparator if parts of the keys are to be compared in non lexicographic order (for example, if a key contains sequences of digits that should be compared as numbers, or if keys are hierarchical, with components separated by periods). Values need to be encoded wrt the special escape format defined for properties files. As a separate set of functionality, a corresponding method or set of methods could be provided to support populating a Map from an input source containing contents formatted as specified in j.u.Properties. So, io with a touch of codec? Simon
