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

I'd go with your second example, ie. handle the special case outside of the loop, just write it a bit more straightforward:

String itemOutput = "[";

if (items.length > 0) {
    itemOutput += items[0];

    for (int i = 1; i < items.length; i++) {
        itemOutput += ", " + items[i];
    }
}

itemOutput += "]";