What is an Iterator?

[Guest_imported]

Hi ,, I'm a real newbie,, and have but a slight idea of what an iterator is..

From what I understand its supposed to count the number of elements in an array implicitly..?? is this right?
Probably not,, so please help!!

THANK U!!

 

[meadandale]

An iterator is a object that 'walks' a list of items. Typically we use iterators to provide convenient and effecient processing of items in a List (rather than manually iterating the list using repeated get(i) calls. Iterators can be more effecient than doing this as well, especially in the case of LinkedList. Iterators are typically used with Collections. See the java tutorial on Collections for more info