Fastest way to put contents of Set<String> to a single String with words separated by a whitespace?

With commons/lang you can do this using StringUtils.join:

String str_1 = StringUtils.join(set_1, " ");

You can't really beat that for brevity.

Update:

Re-reading this answer, I would prefer the other answer regarding Guava's Joiner now. In fact, these days I don't go near apache commons.

Another Update:

Java 8 introduced the method String.join()

String joined = String.join(",", set);

While this isn't as flexible as the Guava version, it's handy when you don't have the Guava library on your classpath.

If you are using Java 8, you can use the native

String.join(CharSequence delimiter, Iterable<? extends CharSequence> elements)

method:

Returns a new String composed of copies of the CharSequence elements joined together with a copy of the specified delimiter. For example:

 Set<String> strings = new LinkedHashSet<>(); strings.add("Java"); strings.add("is"); strings.add("very"); strings.add("cool"); String message = String.join("-", strings); //message returned is: "Java-is-very-cool"

Set implements Iterable, so simply use:

String.join(" ", set_1);

As a counterpoint to Seanizer's commons-lang answer, if you're using Google's Guava Libraries (which I'd consider the 'successor' to commons-lang, in many ways), you'd use Joiner:

Joiner.on(" ").join(set_1);

with the advantage of a few helper methods to do things like:

Joiner.on(" ").skipNulls().join(set_1);// If 2nd item was null, would produce "1, 3"

or

Joiner.on(" ").useForNull("<unknown>").join(set_1);// If 2nd item was null, would produce "1, <unknown>, 3"

It also has support for appending direct to StringBuilders and Writers, and other such niceties.