Java 8: Stream Reduction Operations

A reduction operation is one which allows you to compute a result using all the elements present in a stream. Reduction operations are also called terminal operations because they are always present at the end of a chain of Stream methods.

Java 8 includes several reduction methods, such as sum, average and count, which allow to perform arithmetic operations on Stream objects and get numbers as results. For example, if you want to find the sum of an array of integers, you can use the following code:

int myArray[] = { 1, 5, 8 };
int sum = Arrays.stream(myArray).sum();

If you want to perform more complex reduction operations, however, you must use the reduce method. Unlike the map and filter methods, the reduce method expects two arguments: an identity element, and a lambda expression. You can think of the identity element as an element which does not alter the result of the reduction operation. For example, if you are trying to find the product of all the elements in a stream of numbers, the identity element would be the number 1.

The lambda expression you pass to the reduce method must be capable of handling two inputs: a partial result of the reduction operation, and the current element of the stream. If you are wondering what a partial result is, it’s the result obtained after processing all the elements of the stream that came before the current element.

The following is a sample code snippet which uses the reduce method to concatenate all the elements in an array of String objects:

String[] myArray = { "this", "is", "a", "sentence" };
String result = Arrays.stream(myArray)
                .reduce("", (a,b) -> a + b);