Java Illuminated, 5th Edition

8.9 Methods Accepting a Variable Number of Arguments

Sometimes, the number of arguments to be sent to a method cannot be determined until run time. For example, we may have a method that validates inputs for other methods. The number of inputs may vary from one method call to the next.

In these cases, we can use a feature in the Java language named varargs. We specify in the method header that the method will accept a variable number of arguments by typing three dots immediately after the data type of the last parameter.

The syntax is the following:

accessModifier returnType methodName( (0 to many parameters,)
                                      dataType... lastParameter )

Note that there is no space between the data type and the three dots.

A parameter that a method specifies ...