CollectionUtils class of Apache Commons Collections library provides various utility methods for common operations covering wide range of use cases. It helps avoid writing boilerplate code. This library is very useful prior to jdk 8 as similar functionalities are now provided in Java 8”s Stream API.

Transforming a list

collect() method of CollectionUtils can be used to transform a list of one type of objects to list of different type of objects.

Declaration

Following is the declaration for

org.apache.commons.collections4.CollectionUtils.collect() method −

public static <I,O> Collection<O> collect(Iterable<I> inputCollection, Transformer<? super I,? extends O> transformer)

Parameters

• inputCollection − The collection to get the input from, may not be null.

• Transformer − The transformer to use, may be null.

Return Value

The transformed result (new list).

Exception

• NullPointerException − If the input collection is null.

Example

The following example shows the usage of org.apache.commons.collections4.CollectionUtils.collect() method. We”ll transform a list of string to list of integer by parsing the integer value from String.

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.commons.collections4.CollectionUtils;
import org.apache.commons.collections4.Transformer;

public class CollectionUtilsTester {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      List<String> stringList = Arrays.asList("1","2","3");
      List<Integer> integerList = (List<Integer>) CollectionUtils.collect(stringList,
         new Transformer<String, Integer>() {
      
         @Override
         public Integer transform(String input) {
            return Integer.parseInt(input);
         }
      });
      System.out.println(integerList);
   }
}

Output

When you use the code, you will get the following code −

[1, 2, 3]