Working with a List of Lists in Java

Question

ArrayList<ArrayList<String>> listOLists = new ArrayList<ArrayList<String>>();
ArrayList<String> singleList = new ArrayList<String>();
singleList.add("hello");
singleList.add("world");
listOLists.add(singleList);

ArrayList<String> anotherList = new ArrayList<String>();
anotherList.add("this is another list");
listOLists.add(anotherList);

Here's an example that reads a list of CSV strings into a list of lists and then loops through that list of lists and prints the CSV strings back out to the console.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class ListExample
{
    public static void main(final String[] args)
    {
        //sample CSV strings...pretend they came from a file
        String[] csvStrings = new String[] {
                "abc,def,ghi,jkl,mno",
                "pqr,stu,vwx,yz",
                "123,345,678,90"
        };

        List<List<String>> csvList = new ArrayList<List<String>>();

        //pretend you're looping through lines in a file here
        for(String line : csvStrings)
        {
            String[] linePieces = line.split(",");
            List<String> csvPieces = new ArrayList<String>(linePieces.length);
            for(String piece : linePieces)
            {
                csvPieces.add(piece);
            }
            csvList.add(csvPieces);
        }

        //write the CSV back out to the console
        for(List<String> csv : csvList)
        {
            //dumb logic to place the commas correctly
            if(!csv.isEmpty())
            {
                System.out.print(csv.get(0));
                for(int i=1; i < csv.size(); i++)
                {
                    System.out.print("," + csv.get(i));
                }
            }
            System.out.print("\n");
        }
    }
}

Pretty straightforward I think. Just a couple points to notice:

1. I recommend using "List" instead of "ArrayList" on the left side when creating list objects. It's better to pass around the interface "List" because then if later you need to change to using something like Vector (e.g. you now need synchronized lists), you only need to change the line with the "new" statement. No matter what implementation of list you use, e.g. Vector or ArrayList, you still always just pass around List<String>.

2. In the ArrayList constructor, you can leave the list empty and it will default to a certain size and then grow dynamically as needed. But if you know how big your list might be, you can sometimes save some performance. For instance, if you knew there were always going to be 500 lines in your file, then you could do:

List<List<String>> csvList = new ArrayList<List<String>>(500);

That way you would never waste processing time waiting for your list to grow dynamically grow. This is why I pass "linePieces.length" to the constructor. Not usually a big deal, but helpful sometimes.

Hope that helps!

If you are really like to know that handle CSV files perfectly in Java, it's not good to try to implement CSV reader/writer by yourself. Check below out.

http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/

When your CSV document includes double-quotes or newlines, you will face difficulties.

To learn object-oriented approach at first, seeing other implementation (by Java) will help you. And I think it's not good way to manage one row in a List. CSV doesn't allow you to have difference column size.

The example provided by @tster shows how to create a list of list. I will provide an example for iterating over such a list.

Iterator<List<String>> iter = listOlist.iterator();
while(iter.hasNext()){
    Iterator<String> siter = iter.next().iterator();
    while(siter.hasNext()){
         String s = siter.next();
         System.out.println(s);
     }
}

Something like this would work for reading:

String filename = "something.csv";
BufferedReader input = null;
List<List<String>> csvData = new ArrayList<List<String>>();
try 
{
    input =  new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
    String line = null;
    while (( line = input.readLine()) != null)
    {
        String[] data = line.split(",");
        csvData.add(Arrays.toList(data));
    }
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
      ex.printStackTrace();
}
finally 
{
    if(input != null)
    {
        input.close();
    }
}