[java] Adding two Java 8 streams, or an extra element to a stream

At the end of the day I'm not interested in combining streams, but in obtaining the combined result of processing each element of all those streams.

While combining streams might prove to be cumbersome (thus this thread), combining their processing results is fairly easy.

The key to solve is to create your own collector and ensure that the supplier function for the new collector returns the same collection every time (not a new one), the code below illustrates this approach.

package scratchpad;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.stream.Collector;
import java.util.stream.Stream;

public class CombineStreams {
    public CombineStreams() {
        super();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        List<String> resultList = new ArrayList<>();
        Collector<String, List<String>, List<String>> collector = Collector.of(
                () -> resultList,
                (list, item) -> {
                    list.add(item);
                },
                (llist, rlist) -> {
                    llist.addAll(rlist);
                    return llist;
                }
        );
        String searchString = "Wil";

        System.out.println("After processing first stream\n"
                + createFirstStream().filter(name -> name.contains(searchString)).collect(collector));
        System.out.println();

        System.out.println("After processing second stream\n"
                + createSecondStream().filter(name -> name.contains(searchString)).collect(collector));
        System.out.println();

        System.out.println("After processing third stream\n"
                + createThirdStream().filter(name -> name.contains(searchString)).collect(collector));
        System.out.println();

    }

    private static Stream<String> createFirstStream() {
        return Arrays.asList(
                "William Shakespeare",
                "Emily Dickinson",
                "H. P. Lovecraft",
                "Arthur Conan Doyle",
                "Leo Tolstoy",
                "Edgar Allan Poe",
                "Robert Ervin Howard",
                "Rabindranath Tagore",
                "Rudyard Kipling",
                "Seneca",
                "John Donne",
                "Sarah Williams",
                "Oscar Wilde",
                "Catullus",
                "Alfred Tennyson",
                "William Blake",
                "Charles Dickens",
                "John Keats",
                "Theodor Herzl"
        ).stream();
    }

    private static Stream<String> createSecondStream() {
        return Arrays.asList(
                "Percy Bysshe Shelley",
                "Ernest Hemingway",
                "Barack Obama",
                "Anton Chekhov",
                "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow",
                "Arthur Schopenhauer",
                "Jacob De Haas",
                "George Gordon Byron",
                "Jack London",
                "Robert Frost",
                "Abraham Lincoln",
                "O. Henry",
                "Ovid",
                "Robert Louis Stevenson",
                "John Masefield",
                "James Joyce",
                "Clark Ashton Smith",
                "Aristotle",
                "William Wordsworth",
                "Jane Austen"
        ).stream();
    }

    private static Stream<String> createThirdStream() {
        return Arrays.asList(
                "Niccolò Machiavelli",
                "Lewis Carroll",
                "Robert Burns",
                "Edgar Rice Burroughs",
                "Plato",
                "John Milton",
                "Ralph Waldo Emerson",
                "Margaret Thatcher",
                "Sylvie d'Avigdor",
                "Marcus Tullius Cicero",
                "Banjo Paterson",
                "Woodrow Wilson",
                "Walt Whitman",
                "Theodore Roosevelt",
                "Agatha Christie",
                "Ambrose Bierce",
                "Nikola Tesla",
                "Franz Kafka"
        ).stream();
    }
}