Programming Groovy 2

Other Convenience Methods on Lists

Groovy adds a number of convenience methods to Collections. (For a list, refer to http://groovy.codehaus.org/groovy-jdk/java/util/Collection.html.) Let’s implement an example using the method we’re already familiar with—each. Then we’ll refactor that example using methods that will make our code self-contained and expressive. Along the way, we’ll see how Groovy treats code blocks as first-class citizens, like functional programming languages do.

Suppose we have a collection of strings and want to count the total number of characters. Here’s a way to do that using the each method: