Java Joy: Getting Multiple Results From One Stream With Teeing Collector

If we want to get two types of information from a Stream of objects we can consume the Stream twice and collect the results. But that is not very efficient, especially when the stream has a lot of objects. Since Java 12 we can use the teeing method of the java.util.stream.Collectors class to get multiple results while consuming the stream of objects only once. The teeing method takes two collectors as argument each returning a separate result for the stream items. As third argument we must pass a function that will merge the results of the two collectors into a new object.

In the following code we have two example use cases that use the teeing method to get multiple results while consuming a Stream of objects only one time:

package mrhaki.stream;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.Locale;
import java.util.function.BiFunction;
import java.util.function.Predicate;
import java.util.stream.Collector;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

public class Teeing {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Simple list of language names.
        List<String> languageNames = List.of("Java", "Clojure", "Kotlin", "Groovy", "Scala");

        // Predicate for String value that has the letter j or J.
        Predicate<String> containsJ = s -> s.toLowerCase(Locale.ROOT).contains("j");

        // Collector to apply two filters for one stream process and combine the result.
        Collector<String, ?, List<List<String>>> splitOnLetterJ =
                Collectors.teeing(
                        // Filter on language name with a j or J.
                        Collectors.filtering(containsJ, Collectors.toList()),
                        // Filter on language name withtout a j or J.
                        Collectors.filtering(containsJ.negate(), Collectors.toList()),
                        // Combine both results into a  new List with two items.
                        (withJ, withoutJ) -> List.of(withJ, withoutJ));

        List<List<String>> split = languageNames.stream().collect(splitOnLetterJ);

        assert List.of("Java", "Clojure").equals(split.get(0));
        assert List.of("Kotlin", "Groovy", "Scala").equals(split.get(1));


        // List of language records with a name and 
        // boolean to indicate the language is dynamic or not. 
        List<Language> languages =
                List.of(new Language("Clojure", true),
                        new Language("Java", false),
                        new Language("Groovy", true),
                        new Language("Scala", false),
                        new Language("Kotlin", false));

        // Filter for dynamic languages and transform to list.
        Collector<Language, ?, List<Language>> filteringDynamicLanguages =
                Collectors.filtering(Language::dynamic, Collectors.toUnmodifiableList());
        
        // Make a list with the language names in upper case.
        Collector<Language, ?, List<String>> upperCaseLanguageNames =
                Collectors.mapping(language -> language.name.toUpperCase(Locale.ROOT),
                                   Collectors.toUnmodifiableList());

        // Function to merge both list into a list with first item the result
        // of filteringDynamicLanguages and the second item the result
        // of upperCaseLanguageNames.
        final BiFunction<List<Language>, List<String>, List<List<?>>> mergeLists =
                (dynamicLanguages, upperCaseLanguages) -> List.of(dynamicLanguages, upperCaseLanguages);

        List<List<?>> result = languages
                .stream()
                .collect(
                        Collectors.teeing(
                                filteringDynamicLanguages,
                                upperCaseLanguageNames,
                                mergeLists));

        assert List.of(new Language("Clojure", true), new Language("Groovy", true)).equals(result.get(0));
        assert List.of("CLOJURE", "JAVA", "GROOVY", "SCALA", "KOTLIN").equals(result.get(1));
    }

    // Record to store language name and if the language is dynamic.
    record Language(String name, boolean dynamic) {}
}

Written with Java 16.