What's the best way to build a string of delim

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 in advance. The best I could come up with off the top of my head was something like this:

public String appendWithDelimiter( String original, String addition, String delimiter ) {
    if ( original.equals( "" ) ) {
        return addition;
    } else {
        return original + delimiter + addition;
    }
}

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

I realize this isn't particularly efficient, since there are strings being created all over the place, but I was going for clarity more than optimization.

In Ruby, I can do something like this instead, which feels much more elegant:

parameterArray = [];
parameterArray << "elementName" if condition;
parameterArray << "anotherElementName" if anotherCondition;
parameterString = parameterArray.join(",");

But since Java lacks a join command, I couldn't figure out anything equivalent.

So, what's the best way to do this in Java?

Answer 1

You can use Java's StringBuilder type for this. There's also StringBuffer, but it contains extra thread safety logic that is often unnecessary.

Answer 2

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 3

Use an approach based on java.lang.StringBuilder! ("A mutable sequence of characters. ")

Like you mentioned, all those string concatenations are creating Strings all over. StringBuilder won't do that.

Why StringBuilder instead of StringBuffer? From the StringBuilder javadoc:

Where possible, it is recommended that this class be used in preference to StringBuffer as it will be faster under most implementations.

Answer 4

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 5

So basically something like this:

public static String appendWithDelimiter(String original, String addition, String delimiter) {

if (original.equals("")) {
    return addition;
} else {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(original.length() + addition.length() + delimiter.length());
        sb.append(original);
        sb.append(delimiter);
        sb.append(addition);
        return sb.toString();
    }
}

Answer 6

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;
    }

}