Get unique values from arraylist in java

Question

I have an ArrayList with a number of records and one column contains gas names as CO2 CH4 SO2 etc.Now i want to retrieve different gas names(unique) only without repetation from the ArrayList. How can it be done?

Answer 1

You should use a Set.

A Set is a Collection that contains no duplicates.

If you have a List that contains duplicates, you can get the unique entries like this:

List<String> gasList = // create list with duplicates...
Set<String> uniqueGas = new HashSet<String>(gasList);
System.out.println("Unique gas count: " + uniqueGas.size());

NOTE: This HashSet constructor identifies duplicates by invoking the elements' equals() methods.

Answer 2

I hope I understand your question correctly: assuming that the values are of type String, the most efficient way is probably to convert to a HashSet and iterate over it:

ArrayList<String> values = ... //Your values
HashSet<String> uniqueValues = new HashSet<>(values);
for (String value : uniqueValues) {
   ... //Do something
}

Answer 3

Here's straightforward way without resorting to custom comparators or stuff like that:

Set<String> gasNames = new HashSet<String>();
List<YourRecord> records = ...;

for(YourRecord record : records) {
  gasNames.add(record.getGasName());
}

// now gasNames is a set of unique gas names, which you could operate on:
List<String> sortedGasses = new ArrayList<String>(gasNames);
Collections.sort(sortedGasses);

Note: Using TreeSet instead of HashSet would give directly sorted arraylist and above Collections.sort could be skipped, but TreeSet is otherwise less efficent, so it's often better, and rarely worse, to use HashSet even when sorting is needed.