What type of object does the map method return when applied to an ArrayList instance?

The map method in Java is not a method of the ArrayList class itself. However, if we talk about streams (Stream) that can be obtained from an ArrayList via the stream() method, then calling map returns an object of type Stream<R>, where R is the type of elements after transformation.

Example:

ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<>(List.of("1", "2", "3"));
Stream<Integer> mappedStream = list.stream().map(Integer::parseInt);

Here, map returns a Stream<Integer>. So, when applying map to an ArrayList through streams, it returns a Stream with the transformed element type.