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

With Java 5 variable args, so you don't have to stuff all your strings into a collection or array explicitly:

import junit.framework.Assert;
import org.junit.Test;

public class StringUtil
{
    public static String join(String delim, String... strings)
    {
        StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

        if (strings != null)
        {
            for (String str : strings)
            {
                if (builder.length() > 0)
                {
                    builder.append(delim).append(" ");
                }
                builder.append(str);
            }
        }           
        return builder.toString();
    }
    @Test
    public void joinTest()
    {
        Assert.assertEquals("", StringUtil.join(",", null));
        Assert.assertEquals("", StringUtil.join(",", ""));
        Assert.assertEquals("", StringUtil.join(",", new String[0]));
        Assert.assertEquals("test", StringUtil.join(",", "test"));
        Assert.assertEquals("foo, bar", StringUtil.join(",", "foo", "bar"));
        Assert.assertEquals("foo, bar, x", StringUtil.join(",", "foo", "bar", "x"));
    }
}