What's the best way to build a string of delimited items in Java?

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 i

Answer 1

Don't know if this really is any better, but at least it's using StringBuilder, which may be slightly more efficient.

Down below is a more generic approach if you can build up the list of parameters BEFORE doing any parameter delimiting.

// Answers real question
public String appendWithDelimiters(String delimiter, String original, String addition) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(original);
    if(sb.length()!=0) {
        sb.append(delimiter).append(addition);
    } else {
        sb.append(addition);
    }
    return sb.toString();
}


// A more generic case.
// ... means a list of indeterminate length of Strings.
public String appendWithDelimitersGeneric(String delimiter, String... strings) {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for (String string : strings) {
        if(sb.length()!=0) {
            sb.append(delimiter).append(string);
        } else {
            sb.append(string);
        }
    }

    return sb.toString();
}

public void testAppendWithDelimiters() {
    String string = appendWithDelimitersGeneric(",", "string1", "string2", "string3");
}