What is the LinkedList.getLast method in Java?

A linked list is a collection of linear data elements. Each element (node) contains data and reference parts. The data part has the value and the reference part has the address link to the next element.

The elements are not indexed, so random access as in an array is not possible. Instead, we traverse from the beginning of the list and access the elements.

In Java, the LinkedList is the doubly-linked listA kind of linked list. Each node contains three fields: two link fields(one for the previous element and another for the next element) and one data field. implementation of the List and Deque interfaces. The LinkedList class is present in the java.util package.

The getLast method

The getLast method can be used to get the last element of the LinkedList.

Syntax

public E getLast();

Parameters

This method does not take any input arguments.

Return value

This method returns the last element of the list. If the list is empty then th NoSuchElementException exception is thrown.

Code

The code below demonstrates how to use the getLast method:

import java.util.LinkedList;
class LinkedListGetLast {
public static void main( String args[] ) {
LinkedList<String> list = new LinkedList<>();
list.add("1");
list.add("2");
list.add("3");
System.out.println("The list is " + list);
System.out.println("The last element of the list is " + list.getLast());
}
}

Explanation

In the code above:

  • In line 1, we imported the LinkedList class.
import java.util.LinkedList;
  • In line 4, we created a LinkedList object with the name list.
LinkedList<String> list = new LinkedList<>();
  • From lines 5 to 7, we used the add method of the list object to add three elements ("1", "2", "3") to the list.
list.add("1");
list.add("2");
list.add("3");
  • On line 10, we used the getLast method of the list object to get the last element of the list.
list.getLast(); // "3"

Free Resources