What is the ellipsis (…) for in this method signature?

Question

In the App Engine docs, what is the ellipsis (JID...) for in this method signature?

public MessageBuilder withRecipientJids(JID... recipientJids         


        

Answer 1

The way to use the ellipsis or varargs inside the method is as if it were an array:

public void PrintWithEllipsis(String...setOfStrings) {
    for (String s : setOfStrings)
        System.out.println(s);
}

This method can be called as following:

obj.PrintWithEllipsis(); // prints nothing
obj.PrintWithEllipsis("first"); // prints "first"
obj.PrintWithEllipsis("first", "second"); // prints "first\nsecond"

Inside PrintWithEllipsis, the type of setOfStrings is an array of String. So you could save the compiler some work and pass an array:

String[] argsVar = {"first", "second"};
obj.PrintWithEllipsis(argsVar);

For varargs methods, a sequence parameter is treated as being an array of the same type. So if two signatures differ only in that one declares a sequence and the other an array, as in this example:

void process(String[] s){}
void process(String...s){}

then a compile-time error occurs.

Source: The Java Programming Language specification, where the technical term is variable arity parameter rather than the common term varargs.