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 like to use a flag for the first item.

 ArrayList list = new ArrayList(){{
       add("dog");
       add("cat");
       add("bat");
    }};
    String output = "[";
    boolean first = true;
    for(String word: list){
      if(!first) output += ", ";
      output+= word;
      first = false;
    }
    output += "]";