Question

This is a fairly simple question. When you print out a LinkedList, like so:

System.out.println(list);

It prints it out, surrounding the list in square brackets like this:

[thing 1, thing 2, thing 3]

Is there a way I can print it out without the square brackets?

Answer 1

Yes – iterate the list and print it (with comma after each, but the last element). However, there are utils to help:

Guava:

String result = Joiner.on(", ").join(list);

commons-lang:

String result = StringUtils.join(list, ", ");

And one note: don’t rely on the .toString() method of any object. It is not meant for displaying the object to users, or to be used as a predefined format – it is meant mainly for debugging purposes.