Java, return if trimmed String in List contains String

With Java 8 Stream API:

List<String> myList = Arrays.asList("  A", "B  ", "  C  ");
return myList.stream().anyMatch(str -> str.trim().equals("B"));

You need to iterate your list and call String#trim for searching:

String search = "A";
for(String str: myList) {
    if(str.trim().contains(search))
       return true;
}
return false;

OR if you want to perform ignore case search, then use:

search = search.toLowerCase(); // outside loop

// inside the loop
if(str.trim().toLowerCase().contains(search))

You can do it in a single line by using regex:

if (myList.toString().matches(".*\\bA\\b.*"))

This code should perform quite well.

BTW, you could build the regex from a variable, like this:

.matches("\\[.*\\b" + word + "\\b.*]")

I added [ and ] to each end to prevent a false positive match when the search term contains an open/close square bracket at the start/end.

String search = "A";
for(String s : myList)
    if(s.contains(search)) return true;
return false;

This will iterate over each string in the list, and check if it contains the string you're looking for. If it's only spaces you want to trap for, you can do this:

String search = "A";
for(String s : myList)
    if(s.replaceAll(" ","").contains(search)) return true;
return false;

which will first replace spaces with empty strings before searching. Additionally, if you just want to trim the string first, you can do:

String search = "A";
for(String s : myList)
    if(s.trim().contains(search)) return true;
return false;