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javajava-8java-stream

Is it possible to cast a Stream in Java 8?


Is it possible to cast a stream in Java 8? Say I have a list of objects, I can do something like this to filter out all the additional objects:

Stream.of(objects).filter(c -> c instanceof Client)

After this though, if I want to do something with the clients I would need to cast each of them:

Stream.of(objects).filter(c -> c instanceof Client)
    .map(c -> ((Client) c).getID()).forEach(System.out::println);

This looks a little ugly. Is it possible to cast an entire stream to a different type? Like cast Stream<Object> to a Stream<Client>?

Please ignore the fact that doing things like this would probably mean bad design. We do stuff like this in my computer science class, so I was looking into the new features of java 8 and was curious if this was possible.


Solution

  • I don't think there is a way to do that out-of-the-box. A possibly cleaner solution would be:

    Stream.of(objects)
        .filter(c -> c instanceof Client)
        .map(c -> (Client) c)
        .map(Client::getID)
        .forEach(System.out::println);
    

    or, as suggested in the comments, you could use the cast method - the former may be easier to read though:

    Stream.of(objects)
        .filter(Client.class::isInstance)
        .map(Client.class::cast)
        .map(Client::getID)
        .forEach(System.out::println);