How to search in a List of Java object

You can give a try to Apache Commons Collections.

There is a class CollectionUtils that allows you to select or filter items by custom Predicate.

Your code would be like this:

Predicate condition = new Predicate() {
   boolean evaluate(Object sample) {
        return ((Sample)sample).value3.equals("three");
   }
};
List result = CollectionUtils.select( list, condition );

Update:

In java8, using Lambdas and StreamAPI this should be:

List<Sample> result = list.stream()
     .filter(item -> item.value3.equals("three"))
     .collect(Collectors.toList());

much nicer!

Using Java 8

With Java 8 you can simply convert your list to a stream allowing you to write:

import java.util.List;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

List<Sample> list = new ArrayList<Sample>();
List<Sample> result = list.stream()
    .filter(a -> Objects.equals(a.value3, "three"))
    .collect(Collectors.toList());

Note that

• a -> Objects.equals(a.value3, "three") is a lambda expression
• result is a List with a Sample type
• It's very fast, no cast at every iteration
• If your filter logic gets heavier, you can do list.parallelStream() instead of list.stream() (read this)

Apache Commons

If you can't use Java 8, you can use Apache Commons library and write:

import org.apache.commons.collections.CollectionUtils;
import org.apache.commons.collections.Predicate;

Collection result = CollectionUtils.select(list, new Predicate() {
     public boolean evaluate(Object a) {
         return Objects.equals(((Sample) a).value3, "three");
     }
 });

// If you need the results as a typed array:
Sample[] resultTyped = (Sample[]) result.toArray(new Sample[result.size()]);

Note that:

• There is a cast from Object to Sample at each iteration
• If you need your results to be typed as Sample[], you need extra code (as shown in my sample)

Bonus: A nice blog article talking about how to find element in list.