String is immutable. What exactly is the meaning? [duplicate]

Answer 1

In your example, a refers first to "a", and then to "ty". You're not mutating any String instance; you're just changing which String instance a refers to. For example, this:

String a = "a";
String b = a; // b refers to the same String as a
a = "b"; // a now refers to a different instance
System.out.println(b);

prints "a", because we never mutate the String instance that b points to.

Answer 2

Only the reference is changing. First a was referencing to the string "a", and later you changed it to "ty". The string "a" remains the same.

Answer 3

immutable means you can't not change the value of the same referance.every time you required to create new referance means new memory location. ex:

String str="abc";
str="bcd";

here, in the above code ,in the memory there are 2 blocks for storing the value.the first for value "abc" and second for "bcd".the second value is not replace to first value.

this is call the immutable.

Answer 4

A string is a char[] containing a series of UTF-16 code units, an int offset into that array, and an int length.

For example.

String s

It creates space for a string reference. Assigning copies references around but does not modify the objects to which those references refer.

You should also be aware that

new String(s)

doesn't really do anything useful. It merely creates another instance backed by the same array, offset, and length as s. There is very rarely a reason to do this so it is considered bad practice by most Java programmers.

Java double quoted strings like "my string" are really references to interned String instances so "bar" is a reference to the same String instance regardless of how many times it appears in your code.

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The "hello" creates one instance that is pooled, and the new String(...) creates a non-pooled instance. Try System.out.println(("hello" == "hello") + "," + (new String("hello") == "hello") + "," + (new String("hello") == new String("hello"))); and you should see true,false,false

Answer 5

An immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created.

So a = "ABC" <-- immutable object. "a" holds reference to the object. And, a = "DEF" <-- another immutable object, "a" holds reference to it now.

Once you assign a string object, that object can not be changed in memory.

In summary, what you did is to change the reference of "a" to a new string object.

Answer 6

Hope the below code would clarify your doubts :

public static void testString() {
    String str = "Hello";
    System.out.println("Before String Concat: "+str);
    str.concat("World");
    System.out.println("After String Concat: "+str);
    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer("Hello");
    System.out.println("Before StringBuffer Append: "+sb);
    sb.append("World");
    System.out.println("After StringBuffer Append: "+sb);
}

Before String Concat: Hello
After String Concat: Hello
Before StringBuffer Append: Hello
After StringBuffer Append: HelloWorld