What is the NavigableSet.higher() method in Java?

The NavigableSet.higher() method is used to obtain the lowest element strictly greater than a given element in a set. It returns null if there is no such element in the set.

The NavigableSet.higher() method is present in the NavigableSet interface inside the java.util package.

Let’s understand with the help of an example.

Suppose that a NavigableSet contains [1, 5, 3, 9, 10, 11, 16, 19]. Let 1111 be the element for which we need to determine the higher element. So, the result of NavigableSet.higher() is 1616.

When we add the elements in the NavigableSet, they get stored in a sorted form. If the NavigableSet is of String type, the elements get stored in alphabetical order irrespective of string length.

Parameters

The NavigableSet.higher() method accepts one parameter, i.e., the element of the type of the elements maintained by this Set container.

Return value

The NavigableSet.higher() method returns the lowest element greater than the specified element from the set.

Code

Let us have a look at the code.

import java.util.NavigableSet;
import java.util.TreeSet;
class Main
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
NavigableSet<Integer> s = new TreeSet<Integer>();
s.add(6);
s.add(8);
s.add(5);
s.add(3);
s.add(9);
s.add(10);
s.add(17);
System.out.println("Lowest element greater than 10 is: " + s.higher(10));
}
}

Explanation

  • In lines 1 and 2, we imported the required packages and classes.

  • In line 4 we made a Main class.

  • In line 6, we made a main() function.

  • In line 8, we created a TreeSet of Integer type. The NavigableSet is inherited from SortedSet which is actually inherited from TreeSet only. As SortedSet and NavigableSet are interfaces, we cannot instantiate an object of them.

  • From lines 10 to 16, we added the elements into the NavigableSet by using the add() method.

  • From line 18, we used the NavigableSet.higher() method and displayed the result with a message.

In this way, we can use the NavigableSet.higher() method in Java.

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