How to reverse the elements of a stream in Java

Java 8 introduced the Stream API, a sequence of objects supporting sequential and parallel aggregate operations. By design, a Stream doesn't store any data, so it is not a data structure. It also doesn't modify the original data source.

In simple words, Java 8 streams are just wrappers around a data source like collections, arrays, or other I/O channels. The Stream API provides methods that can be chained together to produce the desired results.

In this article, you'll learn how to reverse the elements of a stream in Java 8 and higher.

Note that this tutorial is not about sorting a stream in reverse order but simply reversing the position of the elements in the Stream.

Let us start s with a basic example:

// create a simple Stream of strings
Stream<String> stream = Stream.of("Alex", "John", "Baray", "Emma");

// reverse stream and print elements
stream.collect(Collectors.toCollection(LinkedList::new))
        .descendingIterator().forEachRemaining(System.out::println);

In the above example, we first created a Stream of string and then collect the elements into a LinkedList.

Since the LinkedList is a double-linked data structure in Java, we can iterate it in any direction: forward and backward.

We preferred to loop over the LinkedList object in the reverse direction using the descendingIterator() method. Here is what the output looks like:

Emma
Baray
John
Alex

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