Why doesn't the String class in Java implement Iterable?

Question

Many Java framework classes implement Iterable, however String does not. It makes sense to iterate over characters in a String, just as one can iterate over items in a regular array.

Is there a reason why String does not implement Iterable?

Answer 1

There really isn't a good answer. An iterator in Java specifically applies to a collection of discrete items (objects). You would think that a String, which implements CharSequence, should be a "collection" of discrete characters. Instead, it is treated as a single entity that happens to consist of characters.

In Java, it seems that iterators are only really applied to collections and not to a string. There is no reason why it is this way (near as I can tell - you would probably have to talk to Gosling or the API writers); it appears to be convention or a design decision. Indeed, there is nothing preventing CharSequence from implementing Iterable.

That said, you can iterate over the characters in a string like so:

for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
  System.out.println(str.charAt(i));
}

Or:

for(char c : str.toCharArray()) {
  System.out.println(c);
}

Or:

"Java 8".chars().forEach(System.out::println);

Also note that you cannot modify a character of a String in place because Strings are immutable. The mutable companion to a String is StringBuilder (or the older StringBuffer).

EDIT

To clarify based on the comments on this answer. I'm trying to explain a possible rationale as to why there is no Iterator on a String. I'm not trying to say that it's not possible; indeed I think it would make sense for CharSequence to implement Iterable.

String provides CharSequence, which, if only conceptually, is different from a String. A String is usually thought of as a single entity, whereas CharSequence is exactly that: a sequence of characters. It would make sense to have an iterator on a sequence of characters (i.e., on CharSequence), but not simply on a String itself.

As Foxfire has rightly pointed out in the comments, String implements the CharSequence interface, so type-wise, a String is a CharSequence. Semantically, it seems to me that they are two separate things - I'm probably being pedantic here, but when I think of a String I usually think of it as a single entity that happens to consist of characters. Consider the difference between the sequence of digits 1, 2, 3, 4 and the number 1234. Now consider the difference between the string abcd and the sequence of characters a, b, c, d. I'm trying to point out this difference.

In my opinion, asking why String doesn't have an iterator is like asking why Integer doesn't have an iterator so that you can iterate over the individual digits.

Answer 2

The reason is simple: The string class is much older than Iterable.

And obviously nobody ever wanted to add the interface to String (which is somewhat strange because it does implement CharSequence which is based on exactly the same idea).

However it would be somewhat imperformant because Iterable returns an object. So it would have to Wrap every Char returned.

Edit: Just as comparison: .Net does support enumerating on String, however in .Net Iterable also works on native types so there is no wrapping required as it would be required in Java.

Answer 3

For what it's worth, my coworker Josh Bloch strongly wishes to add this feature to Java 7:

for (char c : aString) { ... }

and

for (int codePoint : aString) { ... }

This would be the easiest way to loop over chars and over logical characters (code points) ever. It wouldn't require making String implement Iterable, which would force boxing to happen.

Without that language feature, there's not going to be a really good answer to this problem. And he seems very optimistic that he can get this to happen, but I'm not sure.

Answer 4

One of the main reasons for making String implement Iterable is to enable the simple for(each) loop, as mentioned above. So, a reason for not making String implement Iterable could be the inherent inefficiency of a naïve implementation, since it requires boxing the result. However, if the implementation of the resulting Iterator (as returned by String.iterator()) is final, the compiler could special-case it and generate byte-code free from boxing/unboxing.

Answer 5

If you are really instrested in iterating here:

String str = "StackOverflow";

for (char c: str.toCharArray()){
     //here you go
}

Answer 6

They simply forgot to do so.

Answer 7

I'm not sure why this is still not implemented in 2020, my guess would be that Strings are given a lot of special treatment in Java (with compiler overloading the + operator for string concatenation, string literals, string constants stored in a common pool, etc.) that this feature might be harder to implement than it looks (or it might mess up with too many things to be worth the effort from the implementers' point of view).

On the other hand, implementing something close to this is not too much work. I wanted this in one of my project, so I wrote these simple classes:

public class CharIterable implements Iterable<Character> {
  public CharIterable(CharSequence seq) {
    this.seq = seq;
  }

  @Override
  public Iterator<Character> iterator() {
    return new CharIterator(seq);
  }

  private final CharSequence seq;
}

public class CharIterator implements Iterator<Character> {
  public CharIterator(CharSequence sequence) {
    this.sequence = sequence;
  }

  @Override
  public synchronized boolean hasNext() {
    return position < sequence.length();
  }

  @Override
  public synchronized Character next() {
    return sequence.charAt(position++);
  }

  /**
   * Character sequence to iterate over
   */
  private final CharSequence sequence;

  /**
   * Current position of iterator which is the position of the item that
   * will be returned by {@link #next()}.
   */
  private int position = 0;
}

With these I can do this:

for (Character c: new CharIterable("This is a test")) {
  \\ do something with c
}

Now this looks like a lot for such a simple thing but it then allows strings to be treated like an iterable array of characters and work transparently with methods designed to work on collection of things (lists, sets, etc.).

Answer 8

Iterable of what? Iterable<Integer> would make most sense, where each element represents a Unicode codepoint. Even Iterable<Character> would be slow and pointless when we have toCharArray.