Is there a no-duplicate List implementation out th

Question

I know about SortedSet, but in my case I need something that implements List, and not Set. So is there an implementation out there, in the API or elsewhere?

It shouldn't be hard to implement myself, but I figured why not ask people here first?

Answer 1

Off the top of my head, lists allow duplicates. You could quickly implement a UniqueArrayList and override all the add / insert functions to check for contains() before you call the inherited methods. For personal use, you could only implement the add method you use, and override the others to throw an exception in case future programmers try to use the list in a different manner.

Answer 2

There's no Java collection in the standard library to do this. LinkedHashSet<E> preserves ordering similarly to a List, though, so if you wrap your set in a List when you want to use it as a List you'll get the semantics you want.

Alternatively, the Commons Collections (or commons-collections4, for the generic version) has a List which does what you want already: SetUniqueList / SetUniqueList<E>.

Answer 3

So here's what I did eventually. I hope this helps someone else.

class NoDuplicatesList<E> extends LinkedList<E> {
    @Override
    public boolean add(E e) {
        if (this.contains(e)) {
            return false;
        }
        else {
            return super.add(e);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public boolean addAll(Collection<? extends E> collection) {
        Collection<E> copy = new LinkedList<E>(collection);
        copy.removeAll(this);
        return super.addAll(copy);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean addAll(int index, Collection<? extends E> collection) {
        Collection<E> copy = new LinkedList<E>(collection);
        copy.removeAll(this);
        return super.addAll(index, copy);
    }

    @Override
    public void add(int index, E element) {
        if (this.contains(element)) {
            return;
        }
        else {
            super.add(index, element);
        }
    }
}   

Answer 4

The documentation for collection interfaces says:

Set — a collection that cannot contain duplicate elements.
List — an ordered collection (sometimes called a sequence). Lists can contain duplicate elements.

So if you don't want duplicates, you probably shouldn't use a list.

Answer 5

in add method, why not using HashSet.add() to check duplicates instead of HashSet.consist(). HashSet.add() will return true if no duplicate and false otherwise.

Answer 6

Here is what I did and it works.

Assuming I have an ArrayList to work with the first thing I did was created a new LinkedHashMap.

LinkedHashSet<E> hashSet = new LinkedHashSet<E>()

Then I attempt to add my new element to the LinkedHashSet. The add method does not alter the LinkedHasSet and returns false if the new element is a duplicate. So this becomes a condition I can test before adding to the ArrayList.

if (hashSet.add(E)) arrayList.add(E);

This is a simple and elegant way to prevent duplicates from being added to an array list. If you want you can encapsulate it in and override of the add method in a class that extends the ArrayList. Just remember to deal with addAll by looping through the elements and calling the add method.