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

If you are building a string dynamically like that, you shouldn't be using the += operator. The StringBuilder class works much better for repeated dynamic string concatenation.

public String commaSeparate(String[] items, String delim){
    StringBuilder bob = new StringBuilder();
    for(int i=0;i

Then call is like this

String[] items = {"one","two","three"};
StringBuilder bob = new StringBuilder();
bob.append("[");
bob.append(commaSeperate(items,","));
bob.append("]");
System.out.print(bob.toString());