What's the best way to build a string of delimited items in Java?

Question

While working in a Java app, I recently needed to assemble a comma-delimited list of values to pass to another web service without knowing how many elements there would be i

Answer 1

Use StringBuilder and class Separator

StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder();
Separator sep = new Separator(", ");
for (String each : list) {
    buf.append(sep).append(each);
}

Separator wraps a delimiter. The delimiter is returned by Separator's toString method, unless on the first call which returns the empty string!

Source code for class Separator

public class Separator {

    private boolean skipFirst;
    private final String value;

    public Separator() {
        this(", ");
    }

    public Separator(String value) {
        this.value = value;
        this.skipFirst = true;
    }

    public void reset() {
        skipFirst = true;
    }

    public String toString() {
        String sep = skipFirst ? "" : value;
        skipFirst = false;
        return sep;
    }

}