java - Get last element of Stream/List in a one-liner

Question

How can I get the last element of a stream or list in the following code?

Where data.careas is a List<CArea>:

CArea first = data.careas.stream()
                  .filter(c -> c.bbox.orientationHorizontal).findFirst().get();

CArea last = data.careas.stream()
                 .filter(c -> c.bbox.orientationHorizontal)
                 .collect(Collectors.toList()).; //how to?

As you can see getting the first element, with a certain filter, is not hard.

However getting the last element in a one-liner is a real pain:

• It seems I cannot obtain it directly from a Stream. (It would only make sense for finite streams)
• It also seems that you cannot get things like first() and last() from the List interface, which is really a pain.

I do not see any argument for not providing a first() and last() method in the List interface, as the elements in there, are ordered, and moreover the size is known.

But as per the original answer: How to get the last element of a finite Stream?

Personally, this is the closest I could get:

int lastIndex = data.careas.stream()
        .filter(c -> c.bbox.orientationHorizontal)
        .mapToInt(c -> data.careas.indexOf(c)).max().getAsInt();
CArea last = data.careas.get(lastIndex);

However it does involve, using an indexOf on every element, which is most likely not you generally want as it can impair performance.

Answer 1

It is possible to get the last element with the method Stream::reduce. The following listing contains a minimal example for the general case:

Stream<T> stream = ...; // sequential or parallel stream
Optional<T> last = stream.reduce((first, second) -> second);

This implementations works for all ordered streams (including streams created from Lists). For unordered streams it is for obvious reasons unspecified which element will be returned.

The implementation works for both sequential and parallel streams. That might be surprising at first glance, and unfortunately the documentation doesn't state it explicitly. However, it is an important feature of streams, and I try to clarify it:

• The Javadoc for the method Stream::reduce states, that it "is not constrained to execute sequentially".
• The Javadoc also requires that the "accumulator function must be an associative, non-interfering, stateless function for combining two values", which is obviously the case for the lambda expression (first, second) -> second.
• The Javadoc for reduction operations states: "The streams classes have multiple forms of general reduction operations, called reduce() and collect() [..]" and "a properly constructed reduce operation is inherently parallelizable, so long as the function(s) used to process the elements are associative and stateless."

The documentation for the closely related Collectors is even more explicit: "To ensure that sequential and parallel executions produce equivalent results, the collector functions must satisfy an identity and an associativity constraints."

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Back to the original question: The following code stores a reference to the last element in the variable last and throws an exception if the stream is empty. The complexity is linear in the length of the stream.

CArea last = data.careas
                 .stream()
                 .filter(c -> c.bbox.orientationHorizontal)
                 .reduce((first, second) -> second).get();