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

in Java 8 you can do this like:

list.stream().map(Object::toString)
        .collect(Collectors.joining(delimiter));

if list has nulls you can use:

list.stream().map(String::valueOf)
        .collect(Collectors.joining(delimiter))

it also supports prefix and suffix:

list.stream().map(String::valueOf)
        .collect(Collectors.joining(delimiter, prefix, suffix));

Answer 2

For those who are in a Spring context their StringUtils class is useful as well:

There are many useful shortcuts like:

• collectionToCommaDelimitedString(Collection coll)
• collectionToDelimitedString(Collection coll, String delim)
• arrayToDelimitedString(Object[] arr, String delim)

and many others.

This can be helpful if you are not already using Java 8 and you are already in a Spring context.

I prefer it against the Apache Commons (although very good as well) for the Collection support which is easier like this:

// Encoding Set<String> to String delimited 
String asString = org.springframework.util.StringUtils.collectionToDelimitedString(codes, ";");

// Decoding String delimited to Set
Set<String> collection = org.springframework.util.StringUtils.commaDelimitedListToSet(asString);

Answer 3

If you are using Spring MVC then you can try following steps.

import org.springframework.util.StringUtils;

List<String> groupIds = new List<String>;   
groupIds.add("a");    
groupIds.add("b");    
groupIds.add("c");

String csv = StringUtils.arrayToCommaDelimitedString(groupIds.toArray());

It will result to a,b,c

Answer 4

If you're using Eclipse Collections, you can use makeString() or appendString().

makeString() returns a String representation, similar to toString().

It has three forms

• makeString(start, separator, end)
• makeString(separator) defaults start and end to empty strings
• makeString() defaults the separator to ", " (comma and space)

Code example:

MutableList<Integer> list = FastList.newListWith(1, 2, 3);
assertEquals("[1/2/3]", list.makeString("[", "/", "]"));
assertEquals("1/2/3", list.makeString("/"));
assertEquals("1, 2, 3", list.makeString());
assertEquals(list.toString(), list.makeString("[", ", ", "]"));

appendString() is similar to makeString(), but it appends to an Appendable (like StringBuilder) and is void. It has the same three forms, with an additional first argument, the Appendable.

MutableList<Integer> list = FastList.newListWith(1, 2, 3);
Appendable appendable = new StringBuilder();
list.appendString(appendable, "[", "/", "]");
assertEquals("[1/2/3]", appendable.toString());

If you can't convert your collection to an Eclipse Collections type, just adapt it with the relevant adapter.

List<Object> list = ...;
ListAdapter.adapt(list).makeString(",");

Note: I am a committer for Eclipse collections.

Answer 5

You can try something like this:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
if (condition) { sb.append("elementName").append(","); }
if (anotherCondition) { sb.append("anotherElementName").append(","); }
String parameterString = sb.toString();

Answer 6

Pre Java 8:

Apache's commons lang is your friend here - it provides a join method very similar to the one you refer to in Ruby:

StringUtils.join(java.lang.Iterable,char)

---

Java 8:

Java 8 provides joining out of the box via StringJoiner and String.join(). The snippets below show how you can use them:

StringJoiner

StringJoiner joiner = new StringJoiner(",");
joiner.add("01").add("02").add("03");
String joinedString = joiner.toString(); // "01,02,03"

---

String.join(CharSequence delimiter, CharSequence... elements))

String joinedString = String.join(" - ", "04", "05", "06"); // "04 - 05 - 06"

---

String.join(CharSequence delimiter, Iterable<? extends CharSequence> elements)

List<String> strings = new LinkedList<>();
strings.add("Java");strings.add("is");
strings.add("cool");
String message = String.join(" ", strings);
//message returned is: "Java is cool"