What's the best way to iterate an Android Cursor?

Question

I frequently see code which involves iterating over the result of a database query, doing something with each row, and then moving on to the next row. Typical examples are as follows.

Cursor cursor = db.rawQuery(...);
cursor.moveToFirst();
while (cursor.isAfterLast() == false) 
{
    ...
    cursor.moveToNext();
}

Cursor cursor = db.rawQuery(...);
for (boolean hasItem = cursor.moveToFirst(); 
     hasItem; 
     hasItem = cursor.moveToNext()) {
    ...
}

Cursor cursor = db.rawQuery(...);
if (cursor.moveToFirst()) {
    do {
        ...                 
    } while (cursor.moveToNext());
}

These all seem excessively long-winded to me, each with multiple calls to Cursor methods. Surely there must be a neater way?

Answer 1

The simplest way is this:

while (cursor.moveToNext()) {
    ...
}

The cursor starts before the first result row, so on the first iteration this moves to the first result if it exists. If the cursor is empty, or the last row has already been processed, then the loop exits neatly.

Of course, don't forget to close the cursor once you're done with it, preferably in a finally clause.

Cursor cursor = db.rawQuery(...);
try {
    while (cursor.moveToNext()) {
        ...
    }
} finally {
    cursor.close();
}

If you target API 19+, you can use try-with-resources.

try (Cursor cursor = db.rawQuery(...)) {
    while (cursor.moveToNext()) {
        ...
    }
}