Java Cookbook

Chapter 3. Strings and Things

Introduction

Character strings are an inevitable part of just about any programming task. We use them for printing messages to the user, for referring to files on disk or other external media, and for people’s names, addresses, and affiliations. The uses of strings are many, almost without number (actually, if you need numbers, we’ll get to them in Chapter 5).

If you’re coming from a programming language like C, you’ll need to remember that String is a defined type (class) in Java. That is, a string is an object, and therefore has methods. It is not an array of characters and should not be thought of as an array. Operations like fileName.endsWith(".gif") and extension.equals(".gif") (and the equivalent ".gif".equals(extension)) are commonplace.

Notice that a given String object, once constructed, is immutable. That is, once I have said String s = "Hello" + yourName; then the particular object that reference variable s refers to can never be changed. You can assign s to refer to a different string, even one derived from the original, as in s = s.trim( ). And you can retrieve characters from the original string using charAt( ) , but it isn’t called getCharAt( ) because there is not, and never will be, a setCharAt( ) method. Even methods like toUpperCase( ) don’t change the String; they return a new String object containing the translated characters. If you need to change characters within a String, you should instead create a StringBuffer (possibly ...