Iterating SortedSet

Question

I am delving into the ins and outs of SortedSets, and I've encountered a problem.
At times, it is useful to know the index of the set, such as when manipulating an array, we might declare i as an index, and use that value for a whole bunch of reasons.
I've fudged something by converting my SortedSet to an Array, and manipulating the Array as usual. I've also fudged an index value to achieve the same thing.
I've noted that List has a .get() method which (appears) to take an int value just like an array index.
What I'd really like to do is be able to grap a specific element out of my SortedSet based on some index value. For example:
if s is a SortedSet...
for (int i = 0; i < s.size(); i++){
    // do some stuff based on "i" like get the i-th value in s
}I've been reading about wrappers, collections, and so on, but I can't figure out how to do this. Is it even possible?

Answer 1

If you're doing it in a loop from 0 to size(), then you should be using an Iterator. This is true for all collections.
for (Iterator iter = theSet.iter(); iter.hasNext(); ) {
    MyThingie thing = (MyThingie)iter.next();
    // do stuff with thing
or, using the enhanced for loop of 5.0: for (MyThingie thing : theSet) {
// do stuff with thing
If you just want to randomly access a one or a few of the elements, then the easiest thing to do would be to put the contents of the set into an array (using Set's toArray method) or into an ArrayList (using ArrayList c'tor that takes a Collection as an arg).
Sets don't have a get(i) method because unlike Lists, Sets to not have an inherent order. They're more like a box full of things. It seems like it would make sense for SortedSet to have get(i) though, since sorting implies an order. I don't know why it doesn't.