Jeff Mesnil

When you call the toString() method on an array in Java, you don’t get an useful representation:

Object[] foo = {"bar", "baz"};
System.out.println(foo);

>>> [Ljava.lang.Object;@e0b6f5

I used to create my own representation of the array:

StringBuffer buff = new StringBuffer("[");
for (int i = 0; i < foo.length; i++) {
   if (i > 0) {
      buff.append(", ");
   }
   buff.append(foo[i]);
}
buff.append("]");
System.out.println(buff.toString());

>>> ["bar", "baz"]

But I recently discovered that the Collections Framework already offers this function:

System.out.println(Arrays.asList(foo));

>>> ["bar", "baz"]

The trick is that you rely on the stringified representation of a List to get the stringified representation of the array.