Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

String

Synopsis

The String class represents a read-only string of characters. A String object is created by the Java compiler whenever it encounters a string in double quotes; this method of creation is typically simpler than using a constructor. The static valueOf( ) factory methods create new String objects that hold the textual representation of various Java primitive types. There are also valueOf( ) methods, copyValueOf( ) methods and String( ) constructors for creating a String object that holds a copy of the text contained in another String, StringBuffer, StringBuilder, or a char or int array. You can also use the String( ) constructor to create a String object from an array of bytes. If you do this, you may explicitly specify the name of the charset (or character encoding) to be used to decode the bytes into characters, or you can rely on the default charset for your platform. (See java.nio.charset.Charset for more on charset names.)

In Java 5.0, the static format( ) methods provide another useful way to create String objects that hold formatted text. These utility methods create and use a new java.util.Formatter object and behave like the sprintf( ) function in the C programming language.

length( ) returns the number of characters in a string. charAt( ) extracts a character from a string. You can use these two methods to iterate through the characters of a string. You can obtain a char array that holds the characters of a string with toCharArray( ), or use getChars( ...