Best way to convert an ArrayList to a string

Answer 1

Loop through it and call toString. There isn't a magic way, and if there were, what do you think it would be doing under the covers other than looping through it? About the only micro-optimization would be to use StringBuilder instead of String, and even that isn't a huge win - concatenating strings turns into StringBuilder under the covers, but at least if you write it that way you can see what's going on.

StringBuilder out = new StringBuilder();
for (Object o : list)
{
  out.append(o.toString());
  out.append("\t");
}
return out.toString();