Before proceeding with this approach, do think about the comments and decide whether the array of hashmaps is the right way to go. If, as I pointed out, you have a bunch of maps, each containing large amounts of information, with one entry being your dates, then this may be the right thing to do, in which case the easiest way to sort the array would be to use Arrays.sort
method:
HashMap[] arr=new Hashmap[100];
for(int i=0;i<100;i++){
HashMap<String,String> child=new HashMap<String,String>();
... // put all the info into the HashMap
child.put("some_time","21:09"); //time changes per iteration(time is in 24-hour format)
arr[i]=child;
}
Arrays.sort(arr, new Comparator<HashMap>() {
public int compare(HashMap o1, HashMap o2) {
String d1 = o1.get("some_time");
String d2 = o2.get("some_time");
//compare the two dates. If you're always in the same format, e.g. HH:MM (24 hours, two-digit hour, two-digit year), you might even be able to simply compare strings:
return d1.compareTo(d2);
}
});