Provide an iterator over the contents of two lists simultaneously?

Question

Suppose I have this:

public class Unit<MobileSuit, Pilot> {      ...      List<MobileSuit> mobileSuits;     List<Pilot> pilots;      ... } 

And I would like to iterate through the pair of each in the simplest way outside of that class. How should I go about doing that? I thought about doing this:

public class Unit<MobileSuit, Pilot> {      ...     Iterator<MobileSuit> iteratinMechas;     Iterator<Pilot> iteratinPeople;      class IteratorCustom<MobileSuit, Pilot> implements Iterator {          public boolean hasNext() {             return iteratinMechas.hasNext() && iteratinPeople.hasNext();         }          public void remove() {             iteratinMechas.remove();             iteratinPeople.remove();         }          public Object next() {             // /!\         }      }      public Iterator iterator() {         return new IteratorCustom<MobileSuit, Pilot>(mobileSuits, pilots);     } } 

Something along those lines.

Anyway, the problem is that I can't really return just a single object from next(), and I also can't have a Iterator take more than one type. So, any thoughts?

Also, I can't make a new class to combine MobileSuit and Pilot. I need to keep them separate, even though I'm iterating through both at a time. The reason is that there might be Mobile Suits that have no pilots, and I'm not sure how to fix that by keeping them at the same class. This class needs to be processed in other places, so I'd have to unify a interface around that and a lot of other stuff. Basically, assume MobileSuit and Pilot need to be separated.

Answer 1

Anyway, the problem is that I can't really return just a single object from next(), and I also can't have a Iterator take more than one type. So, any thoughts?

Obviously you are going to need a light-weight "pair" class. This is roughly analogous to the Map.Entry inner class.

Here's a rough cut at a generic solution:

public class ParallelIterator <T1, T2> implements Iterator<Pair<T1, T2>> {      public class Pair<TT1, TT2> {         private final TT1 v1;         private final TT2 v2;         private Pair(TT1 v1, TT2 v2) { this.v1 = v1; this.v2 = v2; }         ...     }      private final Iterator<T1> it1;     private final Iterator<T2> it2;      public ParallelIterator(Iterator<T1> it1, Iterator<T2> it2) {          this.it1 = it1; this.it2 = it2;     }      public boolean hasNext() { return it1.hasNext() && it2.hasNext(); }      public Pair<T1, T2> next() {         return new Pair<T1, T2>(it1.next(), it2.next());     }      ...  } 

Note: this doesn't explicitly deal with cases where the lists have different lengths. What will happen is that extra elements at the end of the longer list will be silently ignored.