Check two lists for order equality after sorting elements of one list

Question

Basically I would like to know how I can check two lists to see if the position of the elements are the same in both lists after sorting one with Collections package Collections.sort, e.g:

List<String> first = new ArrayList<String>();
a.add("one");
a.add("two");
List<String> second = new ArrayList<String>();
b.add("two");
b.add("one");
Collections.sort(second);

then check if one lists has the elements in the same order, returning a boolean false if the elements position is the same and true otherwise.

PS: I though of just checking the position of the last element but im not sure if thats a good way of doing this.

Answer 1

Just use first.equals(second) after sorting one of the lists. If both have the same number of elements and the elements are pair-wise equal, you'll get true.

This relies, of course, on the element type of the Lists to override equals properly.