Question

Given a generic class:

class MyClass (
       private List l = new LinkedList <String>();

       public void addElement (String s) (l.add (s);)
       .............
)

an accessor method that allows me to iterate on the list as it should be?

I had decided to implement a method that returns an iterator directly, but does not seem correct because it could change the list from the outside with remove ().

What do you think?

Answer 1

import java.util.*;

public Iterator<String> elements() {
  return Collections.unmodifiableList(elements).iterator();
}

If you don’t mind exposing the fact that the elements are stored as a List, you could also use do:

public ListIterator<String> elements() {
  return Collections.unmodifiableList(elements).listIterator();
}

If you want to allow callers to use the “foreach” syntax, you might want to return an Iterable:

public Iterable<String> getElements() {
  return Collections.unmodifiableList(elements);
}

And, again, if you don’t mind exposing that the elements are returned as a List, this last solution could return List<String>