How to find a first/last occurrence of sublist in Java List? As expected Java Collections API has a method for this. See the example for details.

The following Java code demonstrates use of two similar static methods from great java.util.Collections class:

• indexOfSubList
  Returns the first occurrence of sublist within a list or -1 when not found.
• lastIndexOfSubList
  Returns the last occurrence of sublist within a list or -1 when not found.

package com.farenda.java;

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.List;

public class CollectionsIndexOfSublist {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        List<String> list = Arrays.asList("This is a sentence".split(""));

        System.out.println("Original list: " + list);

        findFirstAndLastOccurrence(list, Arrays.asList("i", "s"));

        findFirstAndLastOccurrence(list, Collections.emptyList());

        findFirstAndLastOccurrence(list, Arrays.asList("uh", "oh"));
    }

    private static void findFirstAndLastOccurrence(List<String> words,
                                                   List<String> sublist) {
        System.out.printf("The first occurrence of %s at index: %d%n",
                sublist, Collections.indexOfSubList(words, sublist));

        System.out.printf("The last occurrence of %s at index: %d%n%n",
                sublist, Collections.lastIndexOfSubList(words, sublist));
    }
}

Result of running the code is as follows:

Original list: [T, h, i, s,  , i, s,  , a,  , s, e, n, t, e, n, c, e]
The first occurrence of [i, s] at index: 2
The last occurrence of [i, s] at index: 5

The first occurrence of [] at index: 0
The last occurrence of [] at index: 18

The first occurrence of [uh, oh] at index: -1
The last occurrence of [uh, oh] at index: -1

Note that if we are looking for empty sublist, both indexOfSubList and lastIndexOfSubList found it, but on the first and the last index accordingly.