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.