Best way to convert an ArrayList to a string

Answer 1

If you were looking for a quick one-liner, as of Java 5 you can do this:

myList.toString().replaceAll("\\[|\\]", "").replaceAll(", ","\t")

Additionally, if your purpose is just to print out the contents and are less concerned about the "\t", you can simply do this:

myList.toString()

which returns a string like

[str1, str2, str3]

If you have an Array (not ArrayList) then you can accomplish the same like this:

 Arrays.toString(myList).replaceAll("\\[|\\]", "").replaceAll(", ","\t")

Answer 2

In case you happen to be on Android and you are not using Jack yet (e.g. because it's still lacking support for Instant Run), and if you want more control over formatting of the resulting string (e.g. you would like to use the newline character as the divider of elements), and happen to use/want to use the StreamSupport library (for using streams on Java 7 or earlier versions of the compiler), you could use something like this (I put this method in my ListUtils class):

public static <T> String asString(List<T> list) {
    return StreamSupport.stream(list)
            .map(Object::toString)
            .collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));
}

And of course, make sure to implement toString() on your list objects' class.

Answer 3

This is a pretty old question, but I figure I might as well add a more modern answer - use the Joiner class from Guava:

String joined = Joiner.on("\t").join(list);