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?