Intermediate Operations

Intermediate Operations

Intermediate operations on Java Streams return another Stream and are lazy. They form a processing pipeline that is executed only when a terminal operation is reached.

• map: transform elements
• filter: keep elements matching a predicate
• flatMap: flatten nested structures
• sorted: order stream elements
• distinct: remove duplicates
• limit / skip: control stream size

Since intermediate operations are lazy, they do not execute until a terminal operation such as collect or forEach is invoked.