Java: Printing LinkedList without square brackets?

Question

This is a fairly simple question. When you print out a LinkedList, like so:

System.out.println(list);

It prints it out, surrounding the list in square brackets like this:

[thing 1, thing 2, thing 3]

Is there a way I can print it out without the square brackets?

Answer 1

Yes - iterate the list and print it (with comma after each, but the last element). However, there are utils to help:

Guava:

String result = Joiner.on(", ").join(list);

commons-lang:

String result = StringUtils.join(list, ", ");

And one note: don't rely on the .toString() method of any object. It is not meant for displaying the object to users, or to be used as a predefined format - it is meant mainly for debugging purposes.

Answer 2

A quick-and-dirty answer is:

String s = list.toString();
System.out.println(s.substring(1, s.length()-1));

Answer 3

You could subclass LinkedList and override it's toString() method, but that seems a little excessive. Instead, iterate over it's elements and construct a String with either a StringBuilder, or a StringBuffer(if concurrency is an issue).

Note:
I suggest you don't follow the answer provided by @Sean Owen, since that's implementation-dependent and therefore, fragile.