How to overload a method by method with parameters list that contains parameters of the exact same type but parametrized with other types

Question

I have a methods:

public List convertBy(Function> flines, Function, String> join, Fu         


        

Answer 1

If you want to create a method which applies multiple functions and is not interested in the intermediate values, you can make it a generic method. The code in your question is strange as it assumes that value can be a String and a List<String> at the same time.

But comparing with your other question, there’s a different picture. While the varargs method there can’t work that way, you can easily provide overloaded methods for the actual use cases:

public class InputConverter<T> {

    private T value;

    public InputConverter(T value) {
        this.value = value;
    }
    public <R> R convertBy(Function<? super T, ? extends R> f) {
        return f.apply(value);
    }
    public <T1,R> R convertBy(
        Function<? super T, ? extends T1> f1, Function<? super T1, ? extends R> f2) {
        return f2.apply(f1.apply(value));
    }
    public <T1,T2,R> R convertBy(
        Function<? super T, ? extends T1> f1, Function<? super T1, ? extends T2> f2,
        Function<? super T2, ? extends R> f3) {
        return f3.apply(f2.apply(f1.apply(value)));
    }
    public <T1,T2,T3,R> R convertBy(
        Function<? super T, ? extends T1> f1, Function<? super T1, ? extends T2> f2,
        Function<? super T2, ? extends T3> f3, Function<? super T3, ? extends R> f4) {
        return f4.apply(f3.apply(f2.apply(f1.apply(value))));
    }
}

Assuming that you fixed your interface types and created functions as described in this answer, you can use it like

InputConverter<String> fileConv=new InputConverter<>("LamComFile.txt");
List<String> lines = fileConv.convertBy(flines);
String text = fileConv.convertBy(flines, join);
List<Integer> ints = fileConv.convertBy(flines, join, collectInts);
Integer sumints = fileConv.convertBy(flines, join, collectInts, sum);