How to quickly and conveniently create a one element arraylist

You can use the utility method Arrays.asList and feed that result into a new ArrayList.

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(s));

Other options:

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(Collections.nCopies(1, s));

and

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>(Collections.singletonList(s));

With Java 7+, you may use the "diamond operator", replacing new ArrayList<String>(...) with new ArrayList<>(...).

Java 9

If you're using Java 9+, you can use the List.of method:

List<String> list = new ArrayList<>(List.of(s));

Regardless of the use of each option above, you may choose not to use the new ArrayList<>() wrapper if you don't need your list to be mutable.

With Java 8 Streams:

Stream.of(object).collect(Collectors.toList())

or if you need a set:

Stream.of(object).collect(Collectors.toSet())

The easiest way, that I know of, is to create a fixed-size single element List with Arrays.asList(T...) like

// Returns a List backed by a varargs T.
return Arrays.asList(s);

If it needs vary in size you can construct an ArrayList and the fixed-sizeList like

return new ArrayList<String>(Arrays.asList(s));

and (in Java 7+) you can use the diamond operator <> to make it

return new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList(s));

Collections can return a list with a single element with list being immutable:

Collections.singletonList(s)

The benefit here is IDEs code analysis doesn't warn about single element asList(..) calls.

Collections.singletonList(object)

the list created by this method is immutable.

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