Sort a single String in Java

toCharArray followed by Arrays.sort followed by a String constructor call:

import java.util.Arrays;

public class Test
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String original = "edcba";
        char[] chars = original.toCharArray();
        Arrays.sort(chars);
        String sorted = new String(chars);
        System.out.println(sorted);
    }
}

EDIT: As tackline points out, this will fail if the string contains surrogate pairs or indeed composite characters (accent + e as separate chars) etc. At that point it gets a lot harder... hopefully you don't need this :) In addition, this is just ordering by ordinal, without taking capitalisation, accents or anything else into account.

No there is no built-in String method. You can convert it to a char array, sort it using Arrays.sort and convert that back into a String.

String test= "edcba";
char[] ar = test.toCharArray();
Arrays.sort(ar);
String sorted = String.valueOf(ar);

Or, when you want to deal correctly with locale-specific stuff like uppercase and accented characters:

import java.text.Collator;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Comparator;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Test
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    Collator collator = Collator.getInstance(new Locale("fr", "FR"));
    String original = "éDedCBcbAàa";
    String[] split = original.split("");
    Arrays.sort(split, collator);
    String sorted = "";
    for (int i = 0; i < split.length; i++)
    {
      sorted += split[i];
    }
    System.out.println(sorted); // "aAàbBcCdDeé"
  }
}

In Java 8 it can be done with:

String s = "edcba".chars()
    .sorted()
    .collect(StringBuilder::new, StringBuilder::appendCodePoint, StringBuilder::append)
    .toString();

A slightly shorter alternative that works with a Stream of Strings of length one (each character in the unsorted String is converted into a String in the Stream) is:

String sorted =
    Stream.of("edcba".split(""))
        .sorted()
        .collect(Collectors.joining());

Convert to array of chars → Sort → Convert back to String:

String s = "edcba";
char[] c = s.toCharArray();        // convert to array of chars 
java.util.Arrays.sort(c);          // sort
String newString = new String(c);  // convert back to String
System.out.println(newString);     // "abcde"

Sort a single String in Java

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