How do I convert from int to String?

Question

I\'m working on a project where all conversions from int to String are done like this:

int i = 5;
String strI = \"\" + i;
         


        

Answer 1

A lot of introductory University courses seem to teach this style, for two reasons (in my experience):

• It doesn’t require understanding of classes or methods. Usually, this is taught way before the word “class” is ever mentioned – nor even method calls. So using something like String.valueOf(…) would confuse students.

• It is an illustration of “operator overloading” – in fact, this was sold to us as the idiomatic overloaded operator (small wonder here, since Java doesn’t allow custom operator overloading).

So it may either be born out of didactic necessity (although I’d argue that this is just bad teaching) or be used to illustrate a principle that’s otherwise quite hard to demonstrate in Java.