Using Java 8 to convert a list of objects into a string obtained from the toString() method

Question

There are a lot of useful new things in Java 8. E.g., I can iterate with a stream over a list of objects and then sum the values from a specific field of the Object

Answer 1

Testing both approaches suggested in Shail016 and bpedroso answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/24883180/2832140), the simple StringBuilder + append(String) within a for loop, seems to execute much faster than list.stream().map([...].

Example: This code walks through a Map> builds a json string, using list.stream().map([...]:

if (mapSize > 0) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("[");

    for (Map.Entry> entry : threadsMap.entrySet()) {

        sb.append("{\"" + entry.getKey().toString() + "\":[");
        sb.append(entry.getValue().stream().map(Object::toString).collect(Collectors.joining(",")));
    }
    sb.delete(sb.length()-2, sb.length());
    sb.append("]");
    System.out.println(sb.toString());
}

On my dev VM, junit usually takes between 0.35 and 1.2 seconds to execute the test. While, using this following code, it takes between 0.15 and 0.33 seconds:

if (mapSize > 0) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("[");

    for (Map.Entry> entry : threadsMap.entrySet()) {

        sb.append("{\"" + entry.getKey().toString() + "\":[");

        for (Long tid : entry.getValue()) {
            sb.append(tid.toString() + ", ");
        }
        sb.delete(sb.length()-2, sb.length());
        sb.append("]}, ");
    }
    sb.delete(sb.length()-2, sb.length());
    sb.append("]");
    System.out.println(sb.toString());
}