How to replace a value conditionally in a Collection, such as replaceIf(Predicate)?

Question

Is there any easy way we could replace a value in a List or Collection if the value is null?

We can always do list.stream().filter(Objects::nonNu

Answer 1

This will only work on a List, not on a Collection, as the latter has no notion of replacing or setting an element.

But given a List, it's pretty easy to do what you want using the List.replaceAll() method:

List list = Arrays.asList("a", "b", null, "c", "d", null);
list.replaceAll(s -> s == null ? "x" : s);
System.out.println(list);

Output:

[a, b, x, c, d, x]

If you want a variation that takes a predicate, you could write a little helper function to do that:

static  void replaceIf(List list, Predicate pred, UnaryOperator op) {
    list.replaceAll(t -> pred.test(t) ? op.apply(t) : t);
}

This would be invoked as follows:

replaceIf(list, Objects::isNull, s -> "x");

giving the same result.