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 usually write a for loop like this:

public static String forLoopConditional(String[] items) {
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();         

    builder.append("[");                                 

    for (int i = 0; i < items.length - 1; i++) {         
        builder.append(items[i] + ", ");                 
    }                                                    

    if (items.length > 0) {                              
        builder.append(items[items.length - 1]);         
    }                                                    

    builder.append("]");                                 

    return builder.toString();                           
}