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

A third alternative is the following

StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < items.length - 1; i++) {
    output.append(items[i]);
    output.append(",");
}
if (items.length > 0) output.append(items[items.length - 1]);

But the best is to use a join()-like method. For Java there's a String.join in third party libraries, that way your code becomes:

StringUtils.join(items,',');

FWIW, the join() method (line 3232 onwards) in Apache Commons does use an if within a loop though:

public static String join(Object[] array, char separator, int startIndex, int endIndex)     {
        if (array == null) {
            return null;
        }
        int bufSize = (endIndex - startIndex);
        if (bufSize <= 0) {
            return EMPTY;
        }

        bufSize *= ((array[startIndex] == null ? 16 : array[startIndex].toString().length()) + 1);
        StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder(bufSize);

        for (int i = startIndex; i < endIndex; i++) {
            if (i > startIndex) {
                buf.append(separator);
            }
            if (array[i] != null) {
                buf.append(array[i]);
            }
        }
        return buf.toString();
    }