The Java Stream API: Concatenating, Sorting, and Flat-Mapping

The sample code associated with this post can be found on GitHub.

Sometimes, we will have two different streams of data that we want to aggregate into one stream to analyze. In that case, we can use the Stream.concat(..) method. Here, if we take our list of names from before:

public static List<String> getListOfNames() {
    List<String> names = new ArrayList<>();

    names.add("John");
    names.add("Jacob");
    names.add("Jerry");
    names.add("Josephine");
    names.add("Janine");
    names.add("Alan");
    names.add("Beverly");

    return names;
}

We can concatenate those names that start with "Jo" with those names that start with "Ja":

@Test
public void concatenating() {
    Stream<String> startsWithJo = names.stream().filter(name -> name.startsWith("Jo"));
    Stream<String> startsWithJa = names.stream().filter(name -> name.startsWith("Ja"));

    List<String> combined = Stream.concat(startsWithJo, startsWithJa).collect(Collectors.toList());

    assertEquals("John", combined.get(0));
    assertEquals("Jacob", combined.get(2));

In such situations, it's not uncommon to want to find those values which are distinct--i.e. different from other values in the stream. We can do that with the distinct(..) method:

@Test
public void distinct() {
    String jolene = "Jolene";
    names.add(jolene);
    names.add(jolene);
    names.add(jolene);

    List<String> jolenes = names.stream().filter(name -> name.equals(jolene)).collect(Collectors.toList());

    assertEquals(3, jolenes.size());

    List<String> distinctJolene = jolenes.stream().distinct().collect(Collectors.toList());

    assertEquals(1, distinctJolene.size());
}

You can sort a stream's elements using the .sorted(..) method, which takes a Comparator<T>. Here, we'll sort the stream's elements by the first letter in each name:

@Test
public void sorting() {
    Stream<String> sortedByFirstLetter = names.stream().sorted(new Comparator<String>() {
        @Override
        public int compare(String first, String second) {
            // by first letter
            if (first.charAt(0) > second.charAt(0)) {
                return 1;
            } else if (first.charAt(0) < second.charAt(0)) {
                return -1;
            }
            return 0;
        }
    });

    List<String> sortedAsList = sortedByFirstLetter.collect(Collectors.toList());

    assertEquals("Alan", sortedAsList.get(0));
    assertEquals("Beverly", sortedAsList.get(1));
}

You can flat map a stream of a stream. Flat mapping is weird to think about at first, but basically it applies a mapping function to each of the streams within a stream. Say we have a stream-generating function that takes a word and returns a Stream of letters as Strings:

private Stream<String> getCharactersAsStream(String word) {
    List<String> chars = new ArrayList<>();
    for (int i = 0; i < word.length(); i++) {
        chars.add(word.substring(i, i + 1));
    }
    return chars.stream();
}

Now, calling this method on a stream of names would yield a stream that, if collected, would look like [["j","o","h","n"],["j","a","c","o","b"]...]. This could be difficult to work with, so let's say we want to map that collection that removes the inner collections, leaving us with ["j","o","h","n","j","a","c","o","b",...]. Well, flat map is how you do it:

@Test
public void flatMapping() {
    Stream<Stream<String>> streamsOnStreams = names.stream().map(name -> getCharactersAsStream(name));

    List<Stream<String>> collected = streamsOnStreams.collect(Collectors.toList());
    String[] charsOfJohn = collected.get(0).collect(Collectors.toList()).toArray(new String[0]);
    String[] charsOfJacob = collected.get(1).collect(Collectors.toList()).toArray(new String[0]);

    assertTrue(Arrays.equals(new String[] {"J", "o","h","n"}, charsOfJohn));
    assertTrue(Arrays.equals(new String[] {"J", "a","c","o", "b"}, charsOfJacob));


    List<String> allCharactersFlatMapped = names.stream().flatMap(name -> getCharactersAsStream(name)).collect(Collectors.toList());

    assertEquals("J", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(0));
    assertEquals("o", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(1));
    assertEquals("h", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(2));
    assertEquals("n", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(3));
    assertEquals("J", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(4));
    assertEquals("a", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(5));
    assertEquals("c", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(6));
    assertEquals("o", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(7));
    assertEquals("b", allCharactersFlatMapped.get(8));
}