Core Java Volume I — 3.6. Strings

3.6. Strings
Conceptually, Java strings are sequences of Unicode characters（Java的字符串是一个Unicode序列）. For example, the string "Java\u2122" consists of the five Unicode characters J, a, v, a, and ?. Java does not have a built-in string type（Java没有内置的字符串类型）. Instead, the standard Java library contains a predefined class called, naturally enough, String. Each quoted string is an instance of the String class:

String e = ""; // an empty string
String greeting = "Hello";

3.6.1. Substrings
You can extract a substring（提取子串） from a larger string with the substring method（substring方法） of the String class. For example,

String greeting = "Hello";
String s = greeting.substring(0, 3);

creates a string consisting of the characters "Hel".
The second parameter of substring is the first position that you do not want to copy. In our case, we want to copy positions 0, 1, and 2 (from position 0 to position 2 inclusive). As substring counts it, this means from position 0 inclusive to position 3 exclusive（起始位置包括第1个参数，结束位置不包含第2个参数）.
There is one advantage to the way substring works: Computing the length of the substring is easy. The string s.substring(a, b) always has length b-a. For example, the substring "Hel" has length 3–0=3.
3.6.2. Concatenation（串联/连结）
Java, like most programming languages, allows you to use + to join (concatenate) two strings（使用+号连结连个字符串）.

String expletive = "Expletive";
String PG13 = "deleted";
String message = expletive + PG13;

The preceding code sets the variable message to the string "Expletivedeleted". (Note the lack of a space between the words: The + operator joins two strings in the order received, exactly as they are given.)
When you concatenate a string with a value that is not a string, the latter is converted to a string（字符串与非字符串连结时，非字符串字面直接转为字符串）. (As you will see in Chapter 5, every Java object can be converted to a string.) For example,

int age = 13;
String rating = "PG" + age;

sets rating to the string "PG13".
This feature is commonly used in output statements. For example, System.out.println("The answer is " + answer); is perfectly acceptable and prints what you would expect (and with the correct spacing because of the space after the word is).
3.6.3. Strings Are Immutable（字符串是不可变的）
The String class gives no methods that let you change a character in an existing string（String类没有可以改变字符串值的方法）. If you want to turn greeting into "Help!", you cannot directly change the last positions of greeting into 'p' and '!'. If you are a C programmer, this will make you feel pretty helpless.
How are we going to modify the string? In Java, it is quite easy: Concatenate the substring that you want to keep with the characters that you want to replace.

greeting = greeting.substring(0, 3) + "p!";

This declaration changes the current value of the greeting variable to "Help!".
Since you cannot change the individual characters in a Java string, the documentation refers to the objects of the String class as immutable. Just as the number 3 is always 3, the string "Hello" will always contain the code-unit sequence for the characters H, e, l, l, o. You cannot change these values. Yet you can, as you just saw, change the contents of the string variable greeting and make it refer to a different string, just as you can make a numeric variable currently holding the value 3 hold the value 4.
Isn't that a lot less efficient? It would seem simpler to change the code units than to build up a whole new string from scratch. Well, yes and no. Indeed, it isn't efficient to generate a new string that holds the concatenation of "Hel" and "p!". But immutable strings have one great advantage: The compiler can arrange that strings are shared.
To understand how this works, think of the various strings as sitting in a common pool.
String variables then point to locations in the pool. If you copy a string variable, both the original and the copy share the same characters.
Overall, the designers of Java decided that the efficiency of sharing outweighs the inefficiency of string editing by extracting substrings and concatenating. Look at your own programs; we suspect that most of the time, you don't change strings—you just compare them. (There is one common exception—assembling strings from individual characters or from shorter strings that come from the keyboard or a file. For these situations, Java provides a separate class that we describe in Section 3.6.8, "Building Strings," on p. 74.)

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C++ Note
C programmers are generally bewildered when they see Java strings for the first time because they think of strings as arrays of characters:

char greeting[] = "Hello";

That is a wrong analogy: A Java string is roughly analogous to a char* pointer,

char* greeting = "Hello";

When you replace greeting with another string, the Java code does roughly the following:

char* temp = malloc(6);
strncpy(temp, greeting, 3);
strncpy(temp + 3, "p!", 3);
greeting = temp;

Sure, now greeting points to the string "Help!". And even the most hardened C programmer must admit that the Java syntax is more pleasant than a sequence of strncpy calls. But what if we make another assignment to greeting?

greeting = "Howdy";

Don't we have a memory leak（内存泄露）? After all, the original string was allocated on the heap.
Fortunately, Java does automatic garbage collection. If a block of memory is no longer needed, it will eventually be recycled.
If you are a C++ programmer and use the string class defined by ANSI C++, you will be much more comfortable with the Java String type. C++ string objects also perform automatic allocation and deallocation of memory. The memory management is performed explicitly by constructors, assignment operators, and destructors.
However, C++ strings are mutable（C++中的string是可变的）—you can modify individual characters in a string.

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3.6.4. Testing Strings for Equality
To test whether two strings are equal, use the equals method. The expression

s.equals(t)

returns true if the strings s and t are equal, false otherwise. Note that s and t can be string variables or string constants. For example, the expression

"Hello".equals(greeting)

is perfectly legal（完全合法）. To test whether two strings are identical except for the upper/lowercase letter distinction, use the equalsIgnoreCase method.

"Hello".equalsIgnoreCase("hello")

Do not use the == operator to test whether two strings are equal（不要使用==操作法来比较两个字符串是否相等）! It only determines whether or not the strings are stored in the same location（它只表明两个字符串是否存储在同一个位置）. Sure, if strings are in the same location, they must be equal. But it is entirely possible to store multiple copies of identical strings in different places.

String greeting = "Hello"; //initialize greeting to a string
if (greeting == "Hello") . . .
    // probably true
if (greeting.substring(0, 3) == "Hel") . . .
    // probably false

If the virtual machine always arranges for equal strings to be shared, then you could use the == operator for testing equality. But only string constants are shared, not strings that are the result of operations like + or substring. Therefore, never use == to compare strings lest you end up with a program with the worst kind of bug —— an intermittent one that seems to occur randomly.

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C++ Note
If you are used to the C++ string class, you have to be particularly careful about equality testing. The C++ string class does overload the == operator to test for equality of the string contents. It is perhaps unfortunate that Java goes out of its way to give strings the same "look and feel" as numeric values but then makes strings behave like pointers for equality testing. The language designers could have redefined == for strings, just as they made a special arrangement for +. Oh well, every language has its share of inconsistencies.
C programmers never use == to compare strings but use strcmp instead. The Java method compareTo is the exact analog to strcmp. You can use

if (greeting.compareTo("Hello") == 0) . . .

but it seems clearer to use equals instead.

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3.6.5. Empty and Null Strings
The empty string "" is a string of length 0. You can test whether a string is empty by calling

if (str.length() == 0)

or

if (str.equals(""))

An empty string（空串） is a Java object which holds the string length (namely 0) and an empty contents. However, a String variable can also hold a special value, called null, that indicates that no object is currently associated with the variable. (See Chapter 4 for more information about null.) To test whether a string is null, use the condition

if (str == null)

Sometimes, you need to test that a string is neither null nor empty. Then use the condition

if (str != null && str.length() != 0)

You need to test that str is not null first. As you will see in Chapter 4, it is an error to invoke a method on a null value.
3.6.5. Code Points and Code Units
Java strings are implemented as sequences of char values. As we discussed in Section 3.3.3, "The char Type," on p.49, the char data type is a code unit for representing Unicode code points in the UTF-16 encoding. The most commonly used Unicode characters can be represented with a single code unit（最常用的Unicode字符可以用一个代码单元来表示）. The supplementary characters require a pair of code units（补充字符需要一双代码单元）.
The length method yields the number of code units required for a given string in the UTF-16 encoding. For example:

String greeting = "Hello";
int n = greeting.length(); // is 5.

To get the true length — that is, the number of code points—call

int cpCount = greeting.codePointCount(0, greeting.length());

The call s.charAt(n) returns the code unit at position n, where n is between 0 and s.length()–1. For example:

char first = greeting.charAt(0); // first is 'H'
char last = greeting.charAt(4); // last is 'o'

To get at the ith code point, use the statements

int index = greeting.offsetByCodePoints(0, i);
int cp = greeting.codePointAt(index);

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Note
Like C and C++, Java counts code units and code points in strings starting with 0.

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Why are we making a fuss about code units? Consider the sentence

Φ is the set of integers
The character Φ requires two code units in the UTF-16 encoding. Calling

char ch = sentence.charAt(1)

doesn't return a space but the second code unit of Φ. To avoid this problem, you should not use the char type. It is too low-level.
If your code traverses a string, and you want to look at each code point in turn, use these statements:

int cp = sentence.codePointAt(i);
if (Character.isSupplementaryCodePoint(cp))
    i += 2;
else
    i++;

You can move backwards with the following statements:

i--;
if (Character.isSurrogate(sentence.charAt(i))) i--;
int cp = sentence.codePointAt(i);

3.6.6. The String API
The String class in Java contains more than 50 methods. A surprisingly large number of them are sufficiently useful so that we can imagine using them frequently. The following API note summarizes the ones we found most useful.

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Note
These API notes, found throughout the book, will help you understand the Java Application Programming Interface (API). Each API note starts with the name of a class such as java.lang.String (the significance of the so-called package name java.lang is explained in Chapter 4). The class name is followed by the names, explanations, and parameter descriptions of one or more methods.
We typically do not list all methods of a particular class but select those that are most commonly used and describe them in a concise form. For a full listing, consult the online documentation (see Section 3.6.7, "Reading the Online API Documentation," on p. 72).
We also list the version number in which a particular class was introduced. If a method has been added later, it has a separate version number.

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java.lang.String 1.0

• char charAt(int index)：returns the code unit at the specified location. You probably don't want to call this method unless you are interested in low-level code units.
• int codePointAt(int index) 5.0：returns the code point that starts or ends at the specified location.
• int offsetByCodePoints(int startIndex, int cpCount) 5.0：returns the index of the code point that is cpCount code points away from the code point at startIndex.
• int compareTo(String other)：returns a negative value if the string comes before other in dictionary order, a positive value if the string comes after other in dictionary order, or 0 if the strings are equal.
• boolean endsWith(String suffix)：returns true if the string ends with suffix.
• boolean equals(Object other)：returns true if the string equals other.
• boolean equalsIgnoreCase(String other)：returns true if the string equals other, except for upper/lowercase distinction.
• int indexOf(String str)
• int indexOf(String str, int fromIndex)
• int indexOf(int cp)
• int indexOf(int cp, int fromIndex)：returns the start of the first substring equal to the string str or the code point cp, starting at index 0 or at fromIndex, or -1 if str does not occur in this string.
• int lastIndexOf(String str)
• int lastIndexOf(String str, int fromIndex)
• int lastindexOf(int cp)
• int lastindexOf(int cp, int fromIndex)：returns the start of the last substring equal to the string str or the code point cp, starting at the end of the string or at fromIndex.
• int length()：returns the length of the string.
• int codePointCount(int startIndex, int endIndex) 5.0：returns the number of code points between startIndex and endIndex - 1. Unpaired surrogates are counted as code points.
• String replace(CharSequence oldString, CharSequence newString)：returns a new string that is obtained by replacing all substrings matching oldString in the string with the string newString. You can supply String or StringBuilder objects for the CharSequence parameters.
• boolean startsWith(String prefix)：returns true if the string begins with prefix.
• String substring(int beginIndex)
• String substring(int beginIndex, int endIndex)：returns a new string consisting of all code units from beginIndex until the end of the string or until endIndex - 1.
• String toLowerCase()：returns a new string containing all characters in the original string, with uppercase characters converted to lowercase.
• String toUpperCase()：returns a new string containing all characters in the original string, with lowercase characters converted to uppercase.
• String trim()：returns a new string by eliminating all leading and trailing spaces in the original string.

3.6.8. Building Strings
Occasionally, you need to build up strings from shorter strings, such as keystrokes or words from a file. It would be inefficient to use string concatenation for this purpose. Every time you concatenate strings, a new String object is constructed. This is time-consuming and wastes memory. Using the StringBuilder class avoids this problem.
Follow these steps if you need to build a string from many small pieces. First, construct an empty string builder:

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

(We discuss constructors and the new operator in detail in Chapter 4.)
Each time you need to add another part, call the append method.

builder.append(ch); // appends a single character
builder.append(str); // appends a string

When you are done building the string, call the toString method. You will get a String object with the character sequence contained in the builder.

String completedString = builder.toString();

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Note
The StringBuilder class was introduced in JDK 5.0. Its predecessor, StringBuffer, is slightly less efficient, but it allows multiple threads to add or remove characters. If all string editing happens in a single thread (which is usually the case), you should use StringBuilder instead. The APIs of both classes are identical.

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The following API notes contain the most important methods for the StringBuilder class.
java.lang.StringBuilder 5.0

• StringBuilder()：constructs an empty string builder.
• int length()：returns the number of code units of the builder or buffer.
• StringBuilder append(String str)：appends a string and returns this.
• StringBuilder append(char c)：appends a code unit and returns this.
• StringBuilder appendCodePoint(int cp)：appends a code point, converting it into one or two code units, and returns this.
• void setCharAt(int i, char c)：sets the ith code unit to c.
• StringBuilder insert(int offset, String str)：inserts a string at position offset and returns this.
• StringBuilder insert(int offset, char c)：inserts a code unit at position offset and returns this.
• StringBuilder delete(int startIndex, int endIndex)：deletes the code units with offsets startIndex to endIndex - 1 and returns this.
• String toString()：returns a string with the same data as the builder or buffer contents.