Displaying items of a list in a text window

Question

In a game that I am making, I have a look in my game which goes through an array, and lists the things in the array

public void listOpen() {
    ArrayList<String> open = main.getOpenable();
    for(int i = 0; i < open.size(); i++) {
        String value = open.get(i);
        textWindow.append(value + "\n");
        error.setScroll();
    }
}

Sometimes when I'm running the program I notice that it lags slightly. Is there anyway I can make it more efficient?

Answer 1

Make only one textWindow.append() operation and consider using StringBuilder, to construct string to append.

public void listOpen() {
    ArrayList<String> open = main.getOpenable();
    StringBuilder appendBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    for(int i = 0; i < open.size(); i++) {
        String value = open.get(i);
        appendBuilder.append(value).append("\n");
        error.setScroll();
    }
    textWindow.append(appendBuilder.toString());
}

Answer 2

I just want to add a couple of points.

Code to the Interface instead of its Implementation:

When declaring an object you want to declare it as the highest level object needed as opposed to its specific implementation.

In this case you wrote:

ArrayList<String> open = main.getOpenable();

This requires that main.getOpenable() returns an ArrayList. What happens if in the future you decide to have it return a LinkedList? It could break the current code.

It is a much better idea to simply do:

List<String> open = main.getOpenable();

Now you can pass it any sort of List with no issues.

Note: Obviously you need to ensure that the interface contains all the methods you need to call, but here that is the case.

You can use a for-each loop to iterate over the List:

This may be a style choice, but it leads to cleaner code. Consider the following (using the StringBuilder effeciency):

public void listOpen() {
    ArrayList<String> open = main.getOpenable();
    StringBuilder appendBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    for(String value : open) {
        appendBuilder.append(value).append("\n");
        error.setScroll();
    }
    textWindow.append(appendBuilder.toString());
}

Here the benefit is small, but it does remove a line of code and removes some of the possibility of errors.