How to convert List<Integer> to int[] in Java? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

No one mentioned yet streams added in Java 8 so here it goes:

int[] example1 = list.stream().mapToInt(i->i).toArray();
// OR
int[] example2 = list.stream().mapToInt(Integer::intValue).toArray();

Thought process:

• The simple Stream#toArray returns an Object[] array, so it is not what we want. Also, Stream#toArray(IntFunction<A[]> generator) doesn't do what we want because the generic type A can't represent the primitive type int

• So it would be nice to have some stream which could handle the primitive type int instead of the wrapper Integer, because its toArray method will most likely also return an int[] array (returning something else like Object[] or even boxed Integer[] would be unnatural here). And fortunately Java 8 has such a stream which is IntStream

• So now the only thing we need to figure out is how to convert our Stream<Integer> (which will be returned from list.stream()) to that shiny IntStream. Here the Stream#mapToInt(ToIntFunction<? super T> mapper) method comes to the rescue. All we need to do is pass it a mapping from Integer to int.

  We could use something like Integer#intValue which returns an int as shown below:

  mapToInt( (Integer i) -> i.intValue() )  
  

  (or some may prefer: mapToInt(Integer::intValue).)

  But similar code can be generated using unboxing, since the compiler knows that the result of this lambda must be of type int (the lambda used in mapToInt is an implementation of the ToIntFunction interface which expects as body a method of type: int applyAsInt(T value) which is expected to return an int).

  So we can simply write:

  mapToInt((Integer i)->i)
  

  Also, since the Integer type in (Integer i) can be inferred by the compiler because List<Integer>#stream() returns a Stream<Integer>, we can also skip it which leaves us with

  mapToInt(i -> i)
  

Solution 2:

Unfortunately, I don't believe there really is a better way of doing this due to the nature of Java's handling of primitive types, boxing, arrays and generics. In particular:

• List<T>.toArray won't work because there's no conversion from Integer to int
• You can't use int as a type argument for generics, so it would have to be an int-specific method (or one which used reflection to do nasty trickery).

I believe there are libraries which have autogenerated versions of this kind of method for all the primitive types (i.e. there's a template which is copied for each type). It's ugly, but that's the way it is I'm afraid :(

Even though the Arrays class came out before generics arrived in Java, it would still have to include all the horrible overloads if it were introduced today (assuming you want to use primitive arrays).