Reverse a string in Java

Question

I have \"Hello World\" kept in a String variable named hi.

I need to print it, but reversed.

How can I do this? I understand there

Answer 1

As others have pointed out the preferred way is to use:

new StringBuilder(hi).reverse().toString()

But if you want to implement this by yourself, I'm afraid that the rest of responses have flaws.

The reason is that String represents a list of Unicode points, encoded in a char[] array according to the variable-length encoding: UTF-16.

This means some code points use a single element of the array (one code unit) but others use two of them, so there might be pairs of characters that must be treated as a single unit (consecutive "high" and "low" surrogates).

public static String reverseString(String s) {
    char[] chars = new char[s.length()];
    boolean twoCharCodepoint = false;
    for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
        chars[s.length() - 1 - i] = s.charAt(i);
        if (twoCharCodepoint) {
            swap(chars, s.length() - 1 - i, s.length() - i);
        }
        twoCharCodepoint = !Character.isBmpCodePoint(s.codePointAt(i));
    }
    return new String(chars);
}

private static void swap(char[] array, int i, int j) {
    char temp = array[i];
    array[i] = array[j];
    array[j] = temp;
}

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("C:/temp/reverse-string.txt");
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("Linear B Syllable B008 A: ");
    sb.appendCodePoint(65536); //http://unicode-table.com/es/#10000
    sb.append(".");
    fos.write(sb.toString().getBytes("UTF-16"));
    fos.write("\n".getBytes("UTF-16"));
    fos.write(reverseString(sb.toString()).getBytes("UTF-16"));
}