You will have to either use a loop, or create a collection wrapper like Arrays.asList which works on primitive char arrays (or directly on strings).
List<Character> list = new ArrayList<Character>();
Set<Character> unique = new HashSet<Character>();
for(char c : "abc".toCharArray()) {
list.add(c);
unique.add(c);
}
Here is an Arrays.asList like wrapper for strings:
public List<Character> asList(final String string) {
return new AbstractList<Character>() {
public int size() { return string.length(); }
public Character get(int index) { return string.charAt(index); }
};
}
This one is an immutable list, though. If you want a mutable list, use this with a char[]:
public List<Character> asList(final char[] string) {
return new AbstractList<Character>() {
public int size() { return string.length; }
public Character get(int index) { return string[index]; }
public Character set(int index, Character newVal) {
char old = string[index];
string[index] = newVal;
return old;
}
};
}
Analogous to this you can implement this for the other primitive types. Note that using this normally is not recommended, since for every access you would do a boxing and unboxing operation.
The Guava library contains similar List wrapper methods for several primitive array classes, like Chars.asList, and a wrapper for String in Lists.charactersOf(String).