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

using Dollar is simple as typing:

String joined = $(aCollection).join(",");

NB: it works also for Array and other data types

Implementation

Internally it uses a very neat trick:

@Override
public String join(String separator) {
    Separator sep = new Separator(separator);
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    for (T item : iterable) {
        sb.append(sep).append(item);
    }

    return sb.toString();
}

the class Separator return the empty String only the first time that it is invoked, then it returns the separator:

class Separator {

    private final String separator;
    private boolean wasCalled;

    public Separator(String separator) {
        this.separator = separator;
        this.wasCalled = false;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        if (!wasCalled) {
            wasCalled = true;
            return "";
        } else {
            return separator;
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

Pre Java 8:

Apache's commons lang is your friend here - it provides a join method very similar to the one you refer to in Ruby:

StringUtils.join(java.lang.Iterable,char)

---

Java 8:

Java 8 provides joining out of the box via StringJoiner and String.join(). The snippets below show how you can use them:

StringJoiner

StringJoiner joiner = new StringJoiner(",");
joiner.add("01").add("02").add("03");
String joinedString = joiner.toString(); // "01,02,03"

---

String.join(CharSequence delimiter, CharSequence... elements))

String joinedString = String.join(" - ", "04", "05", "06"); // "04 - 05 - 06"

---

String.join(CharSequence delimiter, Iterable<? extends CharSequence> elements)

List<String> strings = new LinkedList<>();
strings.add("Java");strings.add("is");
strings.add("cool");
String message = String.join(" ", strings);
//message returned is: "Java is cool"

Answer 3

in Java 8 you can do this like:

list.stream().map(Object::toString)
                        .collect(Collectors.joining(delimiter));

if list has nulls you can use:

list.stream().map(String::valueOf)
                .collect(Collectors.joining(delimiter))

Answer 4

In Java 8 you can use String.join():

List<String> list = Arrays.asList("foo", "bar", "baz");
String joined = String.join(" and ", list); // "foo and bar and baz"

Also have a look at this answer for a Stream API example.

Answer 5

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 6

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