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How to copy a java.util.List into another java.util.List

I have a List<SomeBean> that is populated from a Web Service. I want to copy/clone the contents of that list into an empty list of the same type. A Google search for copying a list suggested me to use Collections.copy() method. In all the examples I saw, the destination list was supposed to contain the exact number of items for the copying to take place.
As the list I am using is populated through a web service and it contains hundreds of objects, I cannot use the above technique. Or I am using it wrong??!! Anyways, to make it work, I tried to do something like this, but I still got an IndexOutOfBoundsException.
List<SomeBean> wsList = app.allInOne(template);
List<SomeBean> wsListCopy=new ArrayList<SomeBean>(wsList.size());
Collections.copy(wsListCopy,wsList);
System.out.println(wsListCopy.size());
I tried to use the wsListCopy=wsList.subList(0, wsList.size()) but I got a ConcurrentAccessException later in the code. Hit and trial. :)
Anyways, my question is simple, how can I copy the entire content of my list into another List? Not through iteration, of course.

Just use this:
List<SomeBean> newList = new ArrayList<SomeBean>(otherList);
Note: still not thread safe, if you modify otherList from another thread, then you may want to make that otherList (and even newList) a CopyOnWriteArrayList, for instance -- or use a lock primitive, such as ReentrantReadWriteLock to serialize read/write access to whatever lists are concurrently accessed.

This is a really nice Java 8 way to do it:
List<String> list2 = list1.stream().collect(Collectors.toList());
Of course the advantage here is that you can filter and skip to only copy of part of the list.
e.g.
//don't copy the first element
List<String> list2 = list1.stream().skip(1).collect(Collectors.toList());

originalArrayList.addAll(copyArrayofList);
Please keep on mind whenever using the addAll() method for copy, the contents of both the array lists (originalArrayList and copyArrayofList) references to the same objects will be added to the list so if you modify any one of them then copyArrayofList also will also reflect the same change.
If you don't want side effect then you need to copy each of element from the originalArrayList to the copyArrayofList, like using a for or while loop. for deep copy you can use below code snippet.
but one more thing you need to do, implement the Cloneable interface and override the clone() method for SomeBean class.
public static List<SomeBean> cloneList(List<SomeBean> originalArrayList) {
List<SomeBean> copyArrayofList = new ArrayList<SomeBean>(list.size());
for (SomeBean item : list) copyArrayofList.add(item.clone());
return copyArrayofList;
}

I tried to do something like this, but I still got an IndexOutOfBoundsException.
I got a ConcurrentAccessException
This means you are modifying the list while you are trying to copy it, most likely in another thread. To fix this you have to either
use a collection which is designed for concurrent access.
lock the collection appropriately so you can iterate over it (or allow you to call a method which does this for you)
find a away to avoid needing to copy the original list.

Starting from Java 10:
List<E> oldList = List.of();
List<E> newList = List.copyOf(oldList);
List.copyOf() returns an unmodifiable List containing the elements of the given Collection.
The given Collection must not be null, and it must not contain any null elements.
Also, if you want to create a deep copy of a List, you can find many good answers here.

There is another method with Java 8 in a null-safe way.
List<SomeBean> wsListCopy = Optional.ofNullable(wsList)
.map(Collection::stream)
.orElseGet(Stream::empty)
.collect(Collectors.toList());
If you want to skip one element.
List<SomeBean> wsListCopy = Optional.ofNullable(wsList)
.map(Collection::stream)
.orElseGet(Stream::empty)
.skip(1)
.collect(Collectors.toList());
With Java 9+, the stream method of Optional can be used
Optional.ofNullable(wsList)
.stream()
.flatMap(Collection::stream)
.collect(Collectors.toList())

I tried something similar and was able to reproduce the problem (IndexOutOfBoundsException). Below are my findings:
1) The implementation of the Collections.copy(destList, sourceList) first checks the size of the destination list by calling the size() method. Since the call to the size() method will always return the number of elements in the list (0 in this case), the constructor ArrayList(capacity) ensures only the initial capacity of the backing array and this does not have any relation to the size of the list. Hence we always get IndexOutOfBoundsException.
2) A relatively simple way is to use the constructor that takes a collection as its argument:
List<SomeBean> wsListCopy=new ArrayList<SomeBean>(wsList);

I was having the same problem ConcurrentAccessException and mysolution was to:
List<SomeBean> tempList = new ArrayList<>();
for (CartItem item : prodList) {
tempList.add(item);
}
prodList.clear();
prodList = new ArrayList<>(tempList);
So it works only one operation at the time and avoids the Exeption...

You can use addAll().
eg : wsListCopy.addAll(wsList);

re: indexOutOfBoundsException, your sublist args are the problem; you need to end the sublist at size-1. Being zero-based, the last element of a list is always size-1, there is no element in the size position, hence the error.

I can't see any correct answer. If you want a deep copy you have to iterate and copy object manually (you could use a copy constructor).

You should use the addAll method. It appends all of the elements in the specified collection to the end of the copy list. It will be a copy of your list.
List<String> myList = new ArrayList<>();
myList.add("a");
myList.add("b");
List<String> copyList = new ArrayList<>();
copyList.addAll(myList);

just in case you use Lombok:
mark SomeBean with the following annotation:
#Builder(toBuilder = true, builderMethodName = "")
and Lombok will perform a shallow copy of objects for you using copy constructor:
inputList.stream()
.map(x -> x.toBuilder().build())
.collect(Collectors.toList());

subList function is a trick, the returned object is still in the original list.
so if you do any operation in subList, it will cause the concurrent exception in your code, no matter it is single thread or multi thread.

Need of Iterator class in Java?

The question might be pretty vague I know. But the reason I ask this is because the class must have been made with some thought in mind.
This question came into my mind while browsing through a few questions here on SO.
Consider the following code:
class A
{
private int myVar;
A(int varAsArg)
{
myVar = varAsArg;
}
public static void main(String args[])
{
List<A> myList = new LinkedList<A>();
myList.add(new A(1));
myList.add(new A(2));
myList.add(new A(3));
//I can iterate manually like this:
for(A obj : myList)
System.out.println(obj.myVar);
//Or I can use an Iterator as well:
for(Iterator<A> i = myList.iterator(); i.hasNext();)
{
A obj = i.next();
System.out.println(obj.myVar);
}
}
}
So as you can see from the above code, I have a substitute for iterating using a for loop, whereas, I could do the same using the Iterator class' hasNext() and next() method. Similarly there can be an example for the remove() method. And the experienced users had commented on the other answers to use the Iterator class instead of using the for loop to iterate through the List. Why?
What confuses me even more is that the Iterator class has only three methods. And the functionality of those can be achieved with writing a little different code as well.
Some people might argue that the functionality of many classes can be achieved by writing one's own code instead of using the class made for the purpose. Yes,true. But as I said, Iterator class has only three methods. So why go through the hassle of creating an extra class when the same job can be done with a simple block of code which is not way too complicated to understand either.
EDIT:
While I'm at it, since many of the answers say that I can't achieve the remove functionality without using Iterator,I would just like to know if the following is wrong, or will it have some undesirable result.
for(A obj : myList)
{
if(obj.myVar == 1)
myList.remove(obj);
}
Doesn't the above code snippet do the same thing as remove() ?

Iterator came long before the for statement that you show in the evolution of Java. So that's why it's there. Also if you want to remove something, using Iterator.remove() is the only way you can do it (you can't use the for statement for that).

First of all, the for-each construct actually uses the Iterator interface under the covers. It does not, however, expose the underlying Iterator instance to user code, so you can't call methods on it.
This means that there are some things that require explicit use of the Iterator interface, and cannot be achieved by using a for-each loop.
Removing the current element is one such use case.
For other ideas, see the ListIterator interface. It is a bidirectional iterator that supports inserting elements and changing the element under the cursor. None of this can be done with a for-each loop.
for(A obj : myList)
{
if(obj.myVar == 1)
myList.remove(obj);
}
Doesn't the above code snippet do the same thing as remove() ?
No, it does not. All standard containers that I know of will throw ConcurrentModificationException when you try to do this. Even if it were allowed to work, it is ambiguous (what if obj appears in the list twice?) and inefficient (for linked lists, it would require linear instead of constant time).

The foreach construct (for (X x: list)) actually uses Iterator as its implementation internally. You can feed it any Iterable as a source of elements.
And, as others already remarked: Iterator is longer in Java than foreach, and it provides remove().
Also: how else would you implement your own provider class (myList in your example)? You make it Iterable and implement a method that creates an Iterator.

For one thing, Iterator was created way before the foreach loop (shown in your code sample above) was introduced into Java. (The former came in Java2, the latter only in Java5).
Since Java5, indeed the foreach loop is the preferred idiom for the most common scenario (when you are iterating through a single Iterable at a time, in the default order, and do not need to remove or index elements). Note though that the foreach uses an iterator in the background for standard collection classes; in other words it is just syntactic sugar.

Iterator, listIterator both are used to allow different permission to user, like list iterator have 9 methods but iterator have only 3 methods, but have remove functionality which you can't achieve with for loop. Enumeration is another thing which is also used to give only read permissions.

Iterator is an implementation of the classical GoF design pattern. In that way you can achieve clear behaviour separation from the 'technical code' which iterates (the Iterator) and your business code.
Imagine you have to change the 'next' behaviour (say, by getting not the next element but the next EVEN element). If you rely only on for loops you will have to change manually every single for loop, in a way like this
for (int i; i < list.size(); i = i+2)
while if you use an Iterator you can simply override/rewrite the "next()" and "hasNext()" methods and the change will be visible everywhere in your application.

I think answer to your question is abstraction. Iterator is written because to abstract iterating over different set of collections.
Every collection has different methods to iterate over their elements. ArrayList has indexed access. Queues has poll and peek methods. Stack has pop and peek.
Usually you only need to iterate over elements so Iterator comes into play. You do not care about which type of Collection you need to iterate. You only call iterator() method and user Iterator object itself to do this.
If you ask why not put same methods on Collection interface and get rid of extra object creation. You need to know your current position in collection so you can not implement next method in Collection because you can not use it on different locations because every time you call next() method it will increment index (simplifying every collection has different implementation) so you will skip some objects if you use same collection at different places. Also if collection support concurrency than you can not write a multi-thread safe next() method in collection.
It is usually not safe to remove an object from collection iterating by other means than iterator. Iterator.remove() method is safest way to do it. For ArrayList example:
for(int i=0;i

How can I create a java list using the member variables of an existing list, without using a for loop?

I have a java list
List<myclass> myList = myClass.selectFromDB("where clause");
//myClass.selectFromDB returns a list of objects from DB
But I want a different list, specifically.
List<Integer> goodList = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for(int i = 0;i++; i<= myList.size()) {
goodList[i] = myList[i].getGoodInteger();
}
Yes, I could do a different query from the DB in the initial myList creation, but assume for now I must use that as the starting point and no other DB queries. Can I replace the for loop with something much more efficient?
Thank you very much for any input, apologies for my ignorance.

In order to extract a field from the "myclass", you're going to have to loop through the entire contents of the list. Whether you do that with a for loop, or use some sort of construct that hides the for loop from you, it's still going to take approximately the same time and use the same amount of resources.

An important question is: why do you want to do this? Are you trying to make your code cleaner? If so, you could write a method along these lines:
public static List<Integer> extractGoodInts (List<myClass> myList) {
List<Integer> goodInts = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for(int i = 0; i < myList.size(); i++){
goodInts.add(myList.get(i).getGoodInteger());
}
return goodInts;
}
Then, in your code, you can just go:
List<myClass> myList = myClass.selectFromDB("where clause");
List<Integer> goodInts = myClass.extractGoodInts(myList);
However, if you're trying to make your code more efficient and you're not allowed to change the query, you're out of luck; somehow or another, you're going to need to individually grab each int from the list, which means you're going to be running in O(n) time no matter what clever tricks you can come up with.

There are really only two ways I can think of that you can make this more "efficient":
Somehow split this up between multiple cores so you can do the work in parallel. Of course, this assumes that you've got other cores, they aren't doing anything useful already, and that there's enough processing going on that the overheard of doing this is even worth it. My guess is that (at least) the last point isn't true in your case given that you're just calling a getter. If you wanted to do this you'd try to have a number of threads (I'd probably actually use an Executor and Futures for this) equal to the number of cores, and then give roughly equal amounts of work to each of them (probably just by slicing your list into roughly equal sized pieces).
If you believe that you'll only be accessing a small subset of the resulting List, but are unsure of exactly which elements, you could try doing things lazily. The easiest way to do that would be to use a pre-built lazy mapping List implementation. There's one in Google Collections Library. You use it by calling Lists.transform(). It'll immediately return a List, but it'll only perform your transformation on elements as they are requested. Again, this is only more efficient if it turns out that you only ever look at a small fraction of the output List. If you end up looking at the entire thing this will not be more efficient, and will probably work out to be less efficient.

Not sure what you mean by efficient. As the others said, you have to call the getGoodInteger method on every element of that list one way or another. About the best you can do is avoid checking the size every time:
List<Integer> goodInts = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for (MyClass myObj : myList) {
goodInts.add(myObj.getGoodInteger());
}
I also second jboxer's suggestion of making a function for this purpose.

Whats the replacement of For-Each loop for filtering?

Though for-each loop has many advantages but the problem is ,it doesn't work when you want to Filter(Filtering means removing element from List) a List,Can you please any replacement as even traversing through Index is not a good option..

What do you mean by "filtering"? Removing certain elements from a list? If so, you can use an iterator:
for(Iterator<MyElement> it = list.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {
MyElement element = it.next();
if (some condition) {
it.remove();
}
}
Update (based on comments):
Consider the following example to illustrate how iterator works. Let's say we have a list that contains 'A's and 'B's:
A A B B A
We want to remove all those pesky Bs. So, using the above loop, the code will work as follows:
hasNext()? Yes. next(). element points to 1st A.
hasNext()? Yes. next(). element points to 2nd A.
hasNext()? Yes. next(). element points to 1st B. remove(). iterator counter does NOT change, it still points to a place where B was (technically that's not entirely correct but logically that's how it works). If you were to call remove() again now, you'd get an exception (because list element is no longer there).
hasNext()? Yes. next(). element points to 2nd B. The rest is the same as #3
hasNext()? Yes. next(). element points to 3rd A.
hasNext()? No, we're done. List now has 3 elements.
Update #2: remove() operation is indeed optional on iterator - but only because it is optional on an underlying collection. The bottom line here is - if your collection supports it (and all collections in Java Collection Framework do), so will the iterator. If your collection doesn't support it, you're out of luck anyway.

ChssPly76's answer is the right approach here - but I'm intrigued as to your thinking behind "traversing through index is not a good option". In many cases - the common case in particular being that of an ArrayList - it's extremely efficient. (In fact, in the arraylist case, I believe that repeated calls to get(i++) are marginally faster than using an Iterator, though nowhere near enough to sacrifice readability).
Broadly speaking, if the object in question implements java.util.RandomAccess, then accessing sequential elements via an index should be roughly the same speed as using an Iterator. If it doesn't (e.g. LinkedList would be a good counterexample) then you're right; but don't dismiss the option out of hand.

I have had success using the
filter(java.util.Collection collection, Predicate predicate)
method of CollectionUtils in commons collections.
http://commons.apache.org/collections/api-2.1.1/org/apache/commons/collections/CollectionUtils.html#filter(java.util.Collection,%20org.apache.commons.collections.Predicate)

If you, like me, don't like modifying a collection while iterating through it's elements or if the iterator just doesn't provide an implementation for remove, you can use a temporary collection to just collect the elements you want to delete. Yes, yes, its less efficient compared to modifying the iterator, but to me it's clearer to understand whats happening:
List<Object> data = getListFromSomewhere();
List<Object> filter = new ArrayList<Object>();
// create Filter
for (Object item: data) {
if (throwAway(item)) {
filter.add(item);
}
}
// use Filter
for (Object item:filter) {
data.remove(item);
}
filter.clear();
filter = null;

How to safely remove other elements from a Collection while iterating through the Collection

I'm iterating over a JRE Collection which enforces the fail-fast iterator concept, and thus will throw a ConcurrentModificationException if the Collection is modified while iterating, other than by using the Iterator.remove() method . However, I need to remove an object's "logical partner" if the object meets a condition. Thus preventing the partner from also being processed. How can I do that? Perhaps by using better collection type for this purpose?
Example.
myCollection<BusinessObject>
for (BusinessObject anObject : myCollection)
{
if (someConditionIsTrue)
{
myCollection.remove(anObjectsPartner); // throws ConcurrentModificationException
}
}
Thanks.

It's not a fault of the collection, it's the way you're using it. Modifying the collection while halfway through an iteration leads to this error (which is a good thing as the iteration would in general be impossible to continue unambiguously).
Edit: Having reread the question this approach won't work, though I'm leaving it here as an example of how to avoid this problem in the general case.
What you want is something like this:
for (Iterator<BusinessObject> iter = myCollection.iterator; iter.hasNext(); )
{
BusinessObject anObject = iter.next();
if (someConditionIsTrue)
{
iter.remove();
}
}
If you remove objects through the Iterator itself, it's aware of the removal and everything works as you'd expect. Note that while I think all standard collections work nicely in this respect, Iterators are not required to implement the remove() method so if you have no control over the class of myCollection (and thus the implementation class of the returned iterator) you might need to put more safety checks in there.
An alternative approach (say, if you can't guarantee the iterator supports remove() and you require this functionality) is to create a copy of the collection to iterate over, then remove the elements from the original collection.
Edit: You can probably use this latter technique to achieve what you want, but then you still end up coming back to the reason why iterators throw the exception in the first place: What should the iteration do if you remove an element it hasn't yet reached? Removing (or not) the current element is relatively well-defined, but you talk about removing the current element's partner, which I presume could be at a random point in the iterable. Since there's no clear way that this should be handled, you'll need to provide some form of logic yourself to cope with this. In which case, I'd lean towards creating and populating a new collection during the iteration, and then assigning this to the myCollection variable at the end. If this isn't possible, then keeping track of the partner elements to remove and calling myCollection.removeAll would be the way to go.

You want to remove an item from a list and continue to iterate on the same list. Can you implement a two-step solution where in step 1 you collect the items to be removed in an interim collection and in step 2 remove them after identifying them?

Some thoughts (it depends on what exactly the relationship is between the two objects in the collection):
A Map with the object as the key and the partner as the value.
A CopyOnWriteArrayList, but you have to notice when you hit the partner
Make a copy into a different Collection object, and iterate over one, removing the other. If this original Collection can be a Set, that would certaily be helpful in removal.

You could try finding all the items to remove first and then remove them once you have finished processing the entire list. Skipping over the deleted items as you find them.
myCollection<BusinessObject>
List<BusinessObject> deletedObjects = new ArrayList(myCollection.size());
for (BusinessObject anObject : myCollection)
{
if (!deletedObjects.contains(anObject))
{
if (someConditionIsTrue)
{
deletedObjects.add(anObjectsPartner);
}
}
}
myCollection.removeAll(deletedObjects);

CopyOnWriteArrayList will do what you want.

Why not use a Collection of all the original BusinessObject and then a separate class (such as a Map) which associates them (ie creates partner)? Put these both as a composite elements in it's own class so that you can always remove the Partner when Business object is removed. Don't make it the responsibility of the caller every time they need to remove a BusinessObject from the Collection.
IE
class BusinessObjectCollection implements Collection<BusinessObject> {
Collection<BusinessObject> objects;
Map<BusinessObject, BusinessObject> associations;
public void remove(BusinessObject o) {
...
// remove from collection and dissasociate...
}
}

The best answer is the second, use an iterator.