How to quickly and conveniently create a one element arraylist [duplicate]

The easiest way, that I know of, is to create a fixed-size single element List with Arrays.asList(T...) like

// Returns a List backed by a varargs T.return Arrays.asList(s);

If it needs vary in size you can construct an ArrayList and the fixed-sizeList like

return new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(s));

and (in Java 7+) you can use the diamond operator <> to make it

return new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList(s));

Collections can return a list with a single element with list being immutable:

Collections.singletonList(s)

The benefit here is IDEs code analysis doesn't warn about single element asList(..) calls.

java arraylist collections

Collections.singletonList(object)

the list created by this method is immutable.

java arraylist collections

You can use the utility method Arrays.asList and feed that result into a new ArrayList.

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(s));

Other options:

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(Collections.nCopies(1, s));

and

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(Collections.singletonList(s));

With Java 7+, you may use the "diamond operator", replacing new ArrayList<String>(...) with new ArrayList<>(...).

Java 9

If you're using Java 9+, you can use the List.of method:

List<String> list = new ArrayList<>(List.of(s));

Regardless of the use of each option above, you may choose not to use the new ArrayList<>() wrapper if you don't need your list to be mutable.

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