Set a Cookie

This is a very convenient way to remove all doubles from a List in Java. The only prerequisite is that the elements in the list have proper equals and hashCode methods.

It work by using the constructor of a Set that takes a Collection as an argument.

I poured the snippet in a little program so can run it straight away.

The method 'removeDoubles' uses a HashSet to remove double elements from a list without creating another list. The first occurrences of the multiple elements are kept, others will be removed. The order of the list will be preserved. The parameter list's iterator must support remove. Example of use is given in the main-method.