Is there a concise way to iterate over a stream with indices in Java 8?

Question

Is there a concise way to iterate over a stream whilst having access to the index in the stream?

String[] names = {\"Sam\",\"Pamela\", \"Dave\", \"Pascal\",          


        

Answer 1

The cleanest way is to start from a stream of indices:

String[] names = {"Sam", "Pamela", "Dave", "Pascal", "Erik"};
IntStream.range(0, names.length)
         .filter(i -> names[i].length() <= i)
         .mapToObj(i -> names[i])
         .collect(Collectors.toList());

The resulting list contains "Erik" only.

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One alternative which looks more familiar when you are used to for loops would be to maintain an ad hoc counter using a mutable object, for example an AtomicInteger:

String[] names = {"Sam", "Pamela", "Dave", "Pascal", "Erik"};
AtomicInteger index = new AtomicInteger();
List list = Arrays.stream(names)
                          .filter(n -> n.length() <= index.incrementAndGet())
                          .collect(Collectors.toList());

Note that using the latter method on a parallel stream could break as the items would not necesarily be processed "in order".