What is the (kind of) inverse operation to Java's Stream.flatMap()?

Question

The Stream.flatMap() operation transforms a stream of

a, b, c

into a stream that contains zero or more elements for each input element, e.g.

a1, a2, c1, c2, c3

Is there the opposite operations that batches up a few elements into one new one?

• It is not .reduce(), because this produces only one result
• It is not collect(), because this only fills a container (afaiu)
• It is not forEach(), because this has returns just void and works with side effects

Does it exist? can I simulate it in any way?

Answer 1

Finally I figured out that flatMap is its own "inverse" so to say. I oversaw that flatMap not necessarily increases the number of elements. It may also decrease the number of elements by emitting an empty stream for some of the elements. To implement a group-by operation, the function called by flatMap needs minimal internal state, namely the most recent element. It either returns an empty stream or, at the end of a group, it returns the reduced-to group representative.

Here is a quick implementation where groupBorder must return true if the two elements passed in do not belong to the same group, i.e. between them is the group border. The combiner is the group function that combines, for example (1,a), (1,a), (1,a) into (3,a), given that your group elements are, tuples (int, string).

public class GroupBy<X> implements Function<X, Stream<X>>{

  private final BiPredicate<X, X> groupBorder;
  private final BinaryOperator<X> combiner;
  private X latest = null;

  public GroupBy(BiPredicate <X, X> groupBorder,
                 BinaryOperator<X> combiner) {
    this.groupBorder = groupBorder;
    this.combiner = combiner;
  }

  @Override
  public Stream<X> apply(X elem) {
    // TODO: add test on end marker as additonal parameter for constructor
    if (elem==null) {
      return latest==null ? Stream.empty() : Stream.of(latest);
    }
    if (latest==null) {
      latest = elem;
      return Stream.empty();
    }
    if (groupBorder.test(latest, elem)) {
      Stream<X> result = Stream.of(latest);
      latest = elem;
      return result;
    }
    latest = combiner.apply(latest,  elem);
    return Stream.empty();
  }
}

There is one caveat though: to ship the last group of the whole stream, an end marker must be stuck as the last element into the stream. The above code assumes it is null, but an additional end-marker-tester could be added.

I could not come up with a solution that does not rely on the end marker.

Further I did not also convert between incoming and outgoing elements. For a unique-operation, this would just work. For a count-operation, a previous step would have to map individual elements to a counting object.

Answer 2

You can hack your way around. See the following example:

Stream<List<String>> stream = Stream.of("Cat", "Dog", "Whale", "Mouse")
   .collect(Collectors.collectingAndThen(
       Collectors.partitioningBy(a -> a.length() > 3),
       map -> Stream.of(map.get(true), map.get(false))
    ));