How does compareTo works while comparing the String??

Question

"DEDICATE".compareTo("DEVOTE")

gives -18 as output why?

Kindly explain the calculation.

Answer 1

and In words, DE matches but after D,V not matches result negetive value as difference from its asci value 'D' - 'V' = -18

Answer 2

Aman sharma compareTo()  is used for comparing two strings . Each character of both strings are converted into a Unicode value. However, if both the strings are equal, then this method returns 0 else it only result either negative or positive value.

Answer 3

Aman sharma also it's the integer method so it's return only integer type values

Answer 4

internally it calls this

public static int compareTo(byte[] value, byte[] other, int len1, int len2) {
int lim = Math.min(len1, len2);

for (int k = 0; k < lim; k++) {
if (value[k] != other[k]) {
return getChar(value, k) - getChar(other, k);
}
}
return len1 - len2;
}
// java 15