Collecting Stream of Primitives into Collection or Array

Java Collectors class provides many static methods to collect items from a Stream and store them into a Collection. But these methods do not work with streams of primitives.

//It works perfect !!
List<String> strings = Stream.of("how", "to", "do", "in", "java")
            .collect(Collectors.toList());
 
//Compilation Error !!
IntStream.of(1,2,3,4,5).collect(Collectors.toList());

To convert the Stream of primitives to a Collection, we can adapt one of the following ways. Note that these methods can be applied to all three primitive streams i.e. IntStream, LongStream, and DoubleStream.

1. Collecting IntStream into Collection using Boxed Stream

Using boxed() method of IntStream, LongStream or DoubleStream e.g. IntStream.boxed(), we can get stream of wrapper objects which can be collected by Collectors methods.

//Primitive Stream -> List
List<Integer> listOfIntegers = IntStream.of(1,2,3,4,5)
  .boxed()
  .collect(Collectors.toList());

List<Long> listOfLongs = LongStream.of(1,2,3,4,5)
  .boxed()
  .collect(Collectors.toList());

List<Double> listOfDoubles = DoubleStream.of(1.0,2.0,3.0,4.0,5.0)
  .boxed()
  .collect(Collectors.toList());

2. Collecting IntStream to List by Mapping to Objects

Another way is to manually to the boxing using IntStream.mapToObj(), IntStream.mapToLong() or IntStream.mapToDouble() methods. There are other similar methods in other stream classes, which you can use.

//Primitive Stream -> List
List<Integer> listOfIntegers = IntStream.of(1,2,3,4,5)
  .mapToObj(Integer::valueOf)
  .collect(Collectors.toList());

List<Long> listOfLongs = LongStream.of(1,2,3,4,5)
  .mapToObj(Long::valueOf)
  .collect(Collectors.toList());

List<Double> listOfDoubles = DoubleStream.of(1.0,2.0,3.0,4.0,5.0)
  .mapToObj(Double::valueOf)
  .collect(Collectors.toList());

3. Collecting IntStream to Array

It is also useful to know how to convert the primitive stream to an array. Use IntStream.toArray() method to convert from int stream to array.

int[] intArray = IntStream.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).toArray();

long[] longArray = LongStream.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).toArray();

double[] doubleArray = DoubleStream.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).toArray();

Similarly, use toArray() function of LongStream or DoubleStream as well.

Happy Learning !!

Sourcecode on Github

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