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

You're making this a little more complicated than it has to be. Let's start with the end of your example:

String parameterString = "";
if ( condition ) parameterString = appendWithDelimiter( parameterString, "elementName", "," );
if ( anotherCondition ) parameterString = appendWithDelimiter( parameterString, "anotherElementName", "," );

With the small change of using a StringBuilder instead of a String, this becomes:

StringBuilder parameterString = new StringBuilder();
if (condition) parameterString.append("elementName").append(",");
if (anotherCondition) parameterString.append("anotherElementName").append(",");
...

When you're done (I assume you have to check a few other conditions as well), just make sure you remove the tailing comma with a command like this:

if (parameterString.length() > 0) 
    parameterString.deleteCharAt(parameterString.length() - 1);

And finally, get the string you want with

parameterString.toString();

You could also replace the "," in the second call to append with a generic delimiter string that can be set to anything. If you have a list of things you know you need to append (non-conditionally), you could put this code inside a method that takes a list of strings.

Answer 2

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;
    }

}

Answer 3

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"));
    }
}

Answer 4

Instead of using string concatenation, you should use StringBuilder if your code is not threaded, and StringBuffer if it is.

Answer 5

I would use Google Collections. There is a nice Join facility.
http://google-collections.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/index.html?com/google/common/base/Join.html

But if I wanted to write it on my own,

package util;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterable;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.Iterator;

public class Utils {
    // accept a collection of objects, since all objects have toString()
    public static String join(String delimiter, Iterable<? extends Object> objs) {
        if (objs.isEmpty()) {
            return "";
        }
        Iterator<? extends Object> iter = objs.iterator();
        StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
        buffer.append(iter.next());
        while (iter.hasNext()) {
            buffer.append(delimiter).append(iter.next());
        }
        return buffer.toString();
    }

    // for convenience
    public static String join(String delimiter, Object... objs) {
        ArrayList<Object> list = new ArrayList<Object>();
        Collections.addAll(list, objs);
        return join(delimiter, list);
    }
}

I think it works better with an object collection, since now you don't have to convert your objects to strings before you join them.

Answer 6

In the case of Android, the StringUtils class from commons isn't available, so for this I used

android.text.TextUtils.join(CharSequence delimiter, Iterable tokens)

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/TextUtils.html