Avoid printing the last comma

Question

I\'m trying to print this loop without the last comma. I\'ve been Googling about this and from what i\'ve seen everything seems overcomplex for such a small problem. Surely

Answer 1

A general approach could be to make a distinction between the first item and all the others. The first run, no comma is printed BEFORE i. After that, a comma is printed before i, every time.

public static void atob(int a,int b) {
    boolean first = true;
    for(int i = a; i <= + b; i++) {
        if ( first == false ) System.out.print(","); 
        System.out.print(i);
        first = false;
    }
}

In this specific case, using the ternary operator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_operation), you could write it as compact as:

public static void atob(int a,int b) {
    for(int i = a; i <= + b; i++) {
        System.out.print( i + ( i < b ? "," : "" ) ); 
    }
}

Without ternary operation, this would look like this (and is more readable, which is often a good thing):

public static void atob(int a,int b) {
    for(int i = a; i <= + b; i++) {
        System.out.print( i ); 
        if ( i < b ) System.out.print( "," );
    }
}

(note that + b is the same as b, so you could replace that, as others have done in their answers)