Best Loop Idiom for special casing the last element

Question

I run into this case a lot of times when doing simple text processing and print statements where I am looping over a collection and I want to special case the last element (

Answer 1

There are a lot of for loops in these answers, but I find that an Iterator and while loop reads much more easily. E.g.:

Iterator itemIterator = Arrays.asList(items).iterator();
if (itemIterator.hasNext()) {
  // special-case first item.  in this case, no comma
  while (itemIterator.hasNext()) {
    // process the rest
  }
}

This is the approach taken by Joiner in Google collections and I find it very readable.