Boxed Streams in Java

In Java, a boxed stream is a stream of the wrapper class instances to simulate a stream of primitives.

1. What is a Boxed Stream?

Java Stream API has been designed to work with objects, similar to Collections API. Streams do not treat the primitive types the same as objects.

In Stream API, a stream of primitives can be represented by the following 3 classes:

• IntStream
• LongStream
• DoubleStream

To convert from a stream of primitives to a stream of objects, these classes provide boxed() method that returns a Stream consisting of the elements of the given stream, each boxed to an object of the corresponding wrapper class.

Stream<Integer> stream = IntStream.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).boxed();

Stream<Long> stream1 = LongStream.of(1, 2, 3, 4, 5).boxed();

Stream<Double> stream2 = DoubleStream.of(1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0).boxed();

2. Need of Boxed Streams

Without boxing the stream items, we cannot perform the regular stream operations on them. For example, we cannot collect the int values to a list, directly.

//Compilation issue
/*List<Integer> list = IntStream.of(1,2,3,4,5)
    .collect(Collectors.toList());*/

To make the above collecting process work, we must box the stream items first.

//Works fine
List<Integer> list = IntStream.of(1,2,3,4,5)
    .boxed()
    .collect(Collectors.toList());

Happy Learning !!

Sourcecode on Github