You will have to either use a loop, or create a collection wrapper like Arrays.asList which works on primitive char arrays (or directly on strings).
List<Character> list = new ArrayList<Character>();
Set<Character> unique = new HashSet<Character>();
for(char c : "abc".toCharArray()) {
list.add(c);
unique.add(c);
}
Here is an Arrays.asList like wrapper for strings:
public List<Character> asList(final String string) {
return new AbstractList<Character>() {
public int size() { return string.length(); }
public Character get(int index) { return string.charAt(index); }
};
}
This one is an immutable list, though. If you want a mutable list, use this with a char[]:
public List<Character> asList(final char[] string) {
return new AbstractList<Character>() {
public int size() { return string.length; }
public Character get(int index) { return string[index]; }
public Character set(int index, Character newVal) {
char old = string[index];
string[index] = newVal;
return old;
}
};
}
Analogous to this you can implement this for the other primitive types.
Note that using this normally is not recommended, since for every access you
would do a boxing and unboxing operation.
The lack of a good way to convert between a primitive array and a collection of its corresponding wrapper type is solved by some third party libraries. Guava, a very common one, has a convenience method to do the conversion:
List<Character> characterList = Chars.asList("abc".toCharArray());
Set<Character> characterSet = new HashSet<Character>(characterList);
myString
.chars() // Convert to an IntStream
.mapToObj(i -> (char) i) // Convert int to char, which gets boxed to Character
.collect(Collectors.toList()); // Collect in a List<Character>
(I have absolutely no idea why String#chars() returns an IntStream.)