Removing an element from an ArrayList

Elements can be removed from an ArrayList in the following ways.

Removing an element at a particular index

We can use the remove(int index) method to remove an element at a particular index. The index should be less than the size of ArrayList, otherwise, IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown.

Removing a particular element from the ArrayList

We can also specify the element that we want to remove using the remove(Object o) method, and the first occurrence of that element will be removed.

Removing all the elements within a range

Let’s suppose we need to remove all the elements from index 5 to 9. This can be done using the removeRange(int fromIndex, int toIndex) method. This method will remove, from this list, all of the elements whose index is between fromIndex, inclusive, and toIndex, exclusive. Please note that this method is not defined in the List class. So, it can be used only when the reference type is also ArrayList and not List.

Removing all the elements within a given Collection

We can use the removeAll(Collection<?> c) method to remove, from the given list, all of the elements that are contained in the specified collection.

Removing all the elements from the ArrayList

We can use the clear() method to remove all the elements from the ArrayList.

We saw that remove(int index) removes a method at the given index and remove(Object o) removes the given object from the ArrayList. Suppose we have an ArrayList that contains five elements i.e [13, 21, 43, 2, 9]. Now, if we do list.remove(2), then which overloaded method will be called. Will remove(int index) be called or remove(Object o) be called? remove(int index) will be called because we are passing a primitive to remove method. If we want to delete element 2, we should call remove(new Integer(2)) because elements are stored in an ArrayList as objects and not primitives.

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import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
public class ArrayListDemo {
	public static void main(String args[]) {
		List<Integer> list = new ArrayList<>();
		list.add(10);
		list.add(20);
		list.add(30);
		list.add(40);
		list.add(50);
		list.add(60);
		list.add(70);
		list.add(80);
		
		System.out.println(list);
		
		list.remove(1);  // This will remove the element at index 1 i.e 20.
		System.out.println(list);
		
		list.remove(new Integer(30)); // This will remove 30 from the list
		System.out.println(list);
		list.clear(); //This will remove all the elements from the list.
		System.out.println(list);		
	}
}

Replacing all the elements of the ArrayList

A new method, replaceAll(UnaryOperator<E> operator), was added in Java 8. This method takes a single UnaryOperator type argument. The UnaryOperator interface is a functional interface that has a single abstract method, apply(), that returns a result of the same object type as the operand.

Let’s say we have an ArrayList that contains String objects; we need to make all the elements in this list uppercase. In this case, we can use the replaceAll() method and provide it with a lambda expression that converts each element into uppercase.

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import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
public class ArrayListDemo {
	public static void main(String args[]) {
		List<String> list = new ArrayList<>();
		list.add("apple");
		list.add("banana");
		list.replaceAll((element) -> element.toUpperCase());
		System.out.println(list);
	}
}

Additional operations on ArrayList

Updating an element in ArrayList

To update an element in ArrayList, the set(int index, E e) method can be used. This method takes the index, which needs to be updated and a new value.

Checking if an element is present in the ArrayList

To check if an element is present in the list, we can use the contains(Object o) method. This method returns true if the element is present in the list; otherwise, it returns false.

If we need the index of the first occurrence of the element, then the indexOf(Object o) method can be used. And if we need the last occurrence of the element, the lastIndexOf(Object o) can be used.

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import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
public class ArrayListDemo {
	public static void main(String args[]) {
		List<Integer> list = new ArrayList<>();
		list.add(10);
		list.add(20);
		list.add(30);
		list.add(40);
		list.add(10);
		list.set(1, 100);
    System.out.println(list);
		if (list.contains(30)) {
			System.out.println("List contains 30");
		}
		System.out.println("Index of first occurence of 10 is " + list.indexOf(10));
		System.out.println("Index of last occurence of 10 is " + list.lastIndexOf(10));
	}
}