Question

I wanted to write a function that would take an object and convert it to an array that contains that object as a single element. It occurred to me that I could maybe do this with generics and variable arguments to essentially do this automatically, without the need to write a function for each object type I wished to use. Will this code work? Are there any subtleties I need to be aware of?

public static <X> X[] convert_to_array(X... in_objs){     return in_objs; } 

Answer 1

It works but it seems like:

 Object o = new Object();  someMethod(new Object[] { o } ); 

is a little more straightforward then:

Object o = new Object(); someMethod(convert_to_array(o)); 

In cases where sometimes I want to pass a single object, but other times I want to pass an array, usually I just use an overloaded method in the API:

public void doSomething(Object o) {     doSomething(new Object[] { o } ); }  public void doSomething(Object[] array) {     // stuff goes here. } 

Varargs can be used but only if the array is the last parameter of course.