Concatenate Two ArrayList in Java

In this short code example I am going to share with you how to concatenate two ArrayList in Java.

Concatenate ArrayList using addAll() function

Let’s say we have these two ArrayList(s):

List<String> itemsList1 = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("One", "Two"));
List<String> itemsList2 = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("Three", "Four"));

To concatenate the two lists together we can create a new ArrayList, and then use addAll() function to add to it all elements from itemList1 and then add all elements from itemList 2 like so:

List<String> mergedList = new ArrayList(); 

mergedList.addAll(itemsList1);
mergedList.addAll(itemsList2);

System.out.println("Merged list " + mergedList);

Concatenate ArrayList using Stream API

There are also a couple of ways to join two lists together using Java Stream API. In the below two examples I am going to use same two ArrayList(s) used in the example above:

List<String> itemsList1 = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("One", "Two"));
List<String> itemsList2 = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("Three", "Four"));

Concatenate using Stream.concat

In this example I am also using the distinct() to filter out all duplicates.

 List<String> mergedList2 = Stream.concat(itemsList1.stream(), itemsList2.stream())
               .distinct()
              .collect(Collectors.toList());

System.out.println("Merged list 2 " + mergedList2);

Concatenate using Stream.of and forEach

List<Object> mergedList3 = new ArrayList<>();
Stream.of(itemsList1, itemsList2).forEach(mergedList3::addAll);
System.out.println("Merged list 3 " + mergedList2);

I hope this example is helpful!

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