How does the String object work in Java?

[chrisk]

@Winsling

It’s not the case. Strings are immutable, so if Java has the chance it will reuse existing String objects when you declare a new String. However, you can force it to allocate a new String if you want. In that case, the Strings will point to different locations, but contain the same values - .equals() will return true while == will return false.

If that’s not complicated enough, there’s a method on String, intern(), that will return the canonical representation of the String. If you call that on all your Strings you can use == to compare them. Nobody ever does this.

Alright

I think that the example I most clearly remember was a quiz applet, where you need to test an answer the user types in a textbox to see if it’s identical to the ‘correct’ answer. I don’t imagine that Java would be smart enough to reuse existing String objects in that situation. Hence our need for the .equals()
Actually, I went at least one step more clever and started scanning the input strings, case-insensitive, for various keywords so that the users wouldn’t get marked wrong for some small issue with the way they phrased the answer if they had the core idea right.