Best way to get value from Collection by index

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You shouldn’t. a Collection avoids talking about indexes specifically because it might not make sense for the specific collection. For example, a List implies some form of ordering, but a Set does not.

Collection<String> myCollection = new HashSet<String>();
myCollection.add("Hello");
myCollection.add("World");

for (String elem : myCollection) {
    System.out.println("elem = " + elem);
}

System.out.println("myCollection.toArray()[0] = " + myCollection.toArray()[0]);

gives me:

elem = World
elem = Hello
myCollection.toArray()[0] = World

whilst:

myCollection = new ArrayList<String>();
myCollection.add("Hello");
myCollection.add("World");

for (String elem : myCollection) {
    System.out.println("elem = " + elem);
}

System.out.println("myCollection.toArray()[0] = " + myCollection.toArray()[0]);

gives me:

elem = Hello
elem = World
myCollection.toArray()[0] = Hello

Why do you want to do this? Could you not just iterate over the collection?

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