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 just looking for a comma seperated list of like this: "[The, Cat, in, the, Hat]", don't even waste time writing your own method. Just use List.toString:

List strings = Arrays.asList("The", "Cat", "in", "the", "Hat);

System.out.println(strings.toString());

Provided the generic type of the List has a toString with the value you want to display, just call List.toString:

public class Dog {
    private String name;

    public Dog(String name){
         this.name = name;
    }

    public String toString(){
        return name;
    }
}

Then you can do:

List dogs = Arrays.asList(new Dog("Frank"), new Dog("Hal"));
System.out.println(dogs);

And you'll get: [Frank, Hal]