Iterator in Java

Question

What is Iterator and collections? Does these two have any relations?

// the interface definition
Interface Iterator {
    boolean hasNext();
    Object next();          


        

Answer 1

The Java collections are, as the name says, collections of things. If you don't know that word, look it up in a dictionary.

There are many types of collections. Take for example the mathematical concept of a set. You can put arbitrary things in a set, but it will never contain the same thing more than once. The things in the set are not ordered, that is you cannot say A comes before B. Another type of collection is a list. A list can contain the same thing more than once, and the order of the things in the list is important.

What all these collections have in common is that they contain things, which in Java are called elements. When you want to know which things are in a certain collection, you iterate over the collection, which is just another term for going through all elements. This is what an Iterator does. It basically starts at the beginning of a collection, you can always ask whether there is a next element (hasNext()), and if there is, you can get access to that element (next()), until you have iterated over all elements in the collection.