Java collections convert a string to a list of characters

Question

I would like to convert the string containing abc to a list of characters and a hashset of characters. How can I do that in Java ?

List

        

Answer 1

Use a Java 8 Stream.

myString.chars().mapToObj(i -> (char) i).collect(Collectors.toList());

Breakdown:

myString
    .chars() // Convert to an IntStream
    .mapToObj(i -> (char) i) // Convert int to char, which gets boxed to Character
    .collect(Collectors.toList()); // Collect in a List<Character>

(I have absolutely no idea why String#chars() returns an IntStream.)

Answer 2

Create an empty list of Character and then make a loop to get every character from the array and put them in the list one by one.

List<Character> characterList = new ArrayList<Character>();
char arrayChar[] = abc.toCharArray();
for (char aChar : arrayChar) 
{
    characterList.add(aChar); //  autoboxing 
}

Answer 3

The lack of a good way to convert between a primitive array and a collection of its corresponding wrapper type is solved by some third party libraries. Guava, a very common one, has a convenience method to do the conversion:

List<Character> characterList = Chars.asList("abc".toCharArray());
Set<Character> characterSet = new HashSet<Character>(characterList);

Answer 4

In Java8 you can use streams I suppose. List of Character objects:

List<Character> chars = str.chars()
    .mapToObj(e->(char)e).collect(Collectors.toList());

And set could be obtained in a similar way:

Set<Character> charsSet = str.chars()
    .mapToObj(e->(char)e).collect(Collectors.toSet());