Is there an elegant way of doing something to the last element of a for-each loop in Java?

Question

I'm using Java 6.

Suppose I had a bunch of cats to feed, and suppose myCats is sorted.

for (Cat cat : myCats) {

    feedDryFood(cat);

    //if this is the last cat (my favorite), give her a tuna
    if (...) 
        alsoFeedTuna(cat);
}

and I wanted to treat my last cat specially.

Is there a way to do this elegantly inside the loop? The only way I can think of is counting them.

Stepping back a little bit for a wider picture, is there any programming language that supports this little feature in a for-each loop?

Answer 1

If you need to do this, the best approach might be to use an Iterator. Other than that, you have to count. The iterator has a

hasNext()

method that you can use to determine if you are on the last item of your iterations.

EDIT -- To increase readability you can do something like the following within the Iterator based loop (psuedo):

Cat cat = iter.next();
feedDryFood(cat);

boolean shouldGetTuna = !iter.hasNext();
if (shouldGetTuna) 
    alsoFeedTuna(cat)

that is fairly self-documenting code via clever use of variable names.