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

//Note: if you have access to Java5+, 
//use StringBuilder in preference to StringBuffer.  
//All that has to be replaced is the class name.  
//StringBuffer will work in Java 1.4, though.

appendWithDelimiter( StringBuffer buffer, String addition, 
    String delimiter ) {
    if ( buffer.length() == 0) {
        buffer.append(addition);
    } else {
        buffer.append(delimiter);
        buffer.append(addition);
    }
}


StringBuffer parameterBuffer = new StringBuffer();
if ( condition ) { 
    appendWithDelimiter(parameterBuffer, "elementName", "," );
}
if ( anotherCondition ) {
    appendWithDelimiter(parameterBuffer, "anotherElementName", "," );
}

//Finally, to return a string representation, call toString() when returning.
return parameterBuffer.toString();