hienlt0610
10/24/2019 - 4:52 AM

[Android] VersionHelper

Intro
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Approaches:

  1. Assume an upper limit to the number of sections (ordinals) in a version string as well as a limit to the value represented there. Often 4 dots max, and 999 maximum for any ordinal. You can see where this is going, and it's going towards transforming the version to fit into a string like: "1.0" => "001000000000" with string format or some other way to pad each ordinal. Then do a string compare.
  2. Split the strings on the ordinal separator ('.') and iterate over them and compare a parsed version. This is the approach demonstrated well by Alex Gitelman.
  3. Comparing the ordinals as you parse them out of the version strings in question. If all strings were really just pointers to arrays of characters as in C then this would be the clear approach (where you'd replace a '.' with a null terminator as it's found and move some 2 or 4 pointers around.

Thoughts on the three approaches:

  1. There was a blog post linked that showed how to go with 1. The limitations are in version string length, number of sections and maximum value of the section. I don't think it's crazy to have such a string that breaks 10,000 at one point. Additionally most implementations still end up splitting the string.
  2. Splitting the strings in advance is clear to read and think about, but we are going through each string about twice to do this. I'd like to compare how it times with the next approach.
  3. Comparing the string as you split it give you the advantage of being able to stop splitting very early in a comparison of: "2.1001.100101.9999998" to "1.0.0.0.0.0.1.0.0.0.1". If this were C and not Java the advantages could go on to limit the amount of memory allocated for new strings for each section of each version, but it is not.
VersionHelper.java
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public class VersionHelper {

    /**
     * Compares one version string to another version string by dotted ordinals.
     * eg. "1.0" > "0.09" ; "0.9.5" < "0.10",
     * also "1.0" < "1.0.0" but "1.0" == "01.00"
     *
     * @param left  the left hand version string
     * @param right the right hand version string
     * @return 0 if equal, -1 if thisVersion &lt; comparedVersion and 1 otherwise.
     */
    public static int compare(@NotNull String left, @NotNull String right) {
        if (left.equals(right)) {
            return 0;
        }
        int leftStart = 0, rightStart = 0, result;
        do {
            int leftEnd = left.indexOf('.', leftStart);
            int rightEnd = right.indexOf('.', rightStart);
            Integer leftValue = Integer.parseInt(leftEnd < 0 ?
                left.substring(leftStart) :
                left.substring(leftStart, leftEnd));
            Integer rightValue = Integer.parseInt(rightEnd < 0 ?
                right.substring(rightStart) :
                right.substring(rightStart, rightEnd));
            result = leftValue.compareTo(rightValue);
            leftStart = leftEnd + 1;
            rightStart = rightEnd + 1;
        } while (result == 0 && leftStart > 0 && rightStart > 0);
        if (result == 0) {
            if (leftStart > rightStart) {
                return containsNonZeroValue(left, leftStart) ? 1 : 0;
            }
            if (leftStart < rightStart) {
                return containsNonZeroValue(right, rightStart) ? -1 : 0;
            }
        }
        return result;
    }

    private static boolean containsNonZeroValue(String str, int beginIndex) {
        for (int i = beginIndex; i < str.length(); i++) {
            char c = str.charAt(i);
            if (c != '0' && c != '.') {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return false;
    }
}
VersionHelperTest.java
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public class VersionHelperTest {

    @Test
    public void testCompare() throws Exception {
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("1", "0.9"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("0.0.0.2", "0.0.0.1"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("1.0", "0.9"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("2.0.1", "2.0.0"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("2.0.1", "2.0"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("2.0.1", "2"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("0.9.1", "0.9.0"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("0.9.2", "0.9.1"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("0.9.11", "0.9.2"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("0.9.12", "0.9.11"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("0.10", "0.9"));
        assertEquals(0, VersionHelper.compare("0.10", "0.10"));
        assertEquals(-1, VersionHelper.compare("2.10", "2.10.1"));
        assertEquals(-1, VersionHelper.compare("0.0.0.2", "0.1"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("1.0", "0.9.2"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("1.10", "1.6"));
        assertEquals(0, VersionHelper.compare("1.10", "1.10.0.0.0.0"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("1.10.0.0.0.1", "1.10"));
        assertEquals(0, VersionHelper.compare("1.10.0.0.0.0", "1.10"));
        assertEquals(1, VersionHelper.compare("1.10.0.0.0.1", "1.10"));
    }
}