When should we use intern method of String on String literals

Question

According to String#intern(), intern method is supposed to return the String from the String pool if the String is found in String pool, otherwise a new string

Answer 1

Interned Strings avoid duplicate Strings. Interning saves RAM at the expense of more CPU time to detect and replace duplicate Strings. There is only one copy of each String that has been interned, no matter how many references point to it. Since Strings are immutable, if two different methods incidentally use the same String, they can share a copy of the same String. The process of converting duplicated Strings to shared ones is called interning.String.intern() gives you the address of the canonical master String. You can compare interned Strings with simple == (which compares pointers) instead of equals which compares the characters of the String one by one. Because Strings are immutable, the intern process is free to further save space, for example, by not creating a separate String literal for "pot" when it exists as a substring of some other literal such as "hippopotamus".

To see more http://mindprod.com/jgloss/interned.html

Answer 2

String s1 = "Anish";
        String s2 = "Anish";

        String s3 = new String("Anish");

        /*
         * When the intern method is invoked, if the pool already contains a
         * string equal to this String object as determined by the
         * method, then the string from the pool is
         * returned. Otherwise, this String object is added to the
         * pool and a reference to this String object is returned.
         */
        String s4 = new String("Anish").intern();
        if (s1 == s2) {
            System.out.println("s1 and s2 are same");
        }

        if (s1 == s3) {
            System.out.println("s1 and s3 are same");
        }

        if (s1 == s4) {
            System.out.println("s1 and s4 are same");
        }

OUTPUT

s1 and s2 are same
s1 and s4 are same

Answer 3

string intern() method is used to create an exact copy of heap string object in string constant pool. The string objects in the string constant pool are automatically interned but string objects in heap are not. The main use of creating interns is to save the memory space and to perform faster comparison of string objects.

Source : What is string intern in java?

Answer 4

String p1 = "example";
String p2 = "example";
String p3 = "example".intern();
String p4 = p2.intern();
String p5 = new String(p3);
String p6 = new String("example");
String p7 = p6.intern();

if (p1 == p2)
    System.out.println("p1 and p2 are the same");
if (p1 == p3)
    System.out.println("p1 and p3 are the same");
if (p1 == p4)
    System.out.println("p1 and p4 are the same");
if (p1 == p5)
    System.out.println("p1 and p5 are the same");
if (p1 == p6)
    System.out.println("p1 and p6 are the same");
if (p1 == p6.intern())
    System.out.println("p1 and p6 are the same when intern is used");
if (p1 == p7)
    System.out.println("p1 and p7 are the same");

When two strings are created independently, intern() allows you to compare them and also it helps you in creating a reference in the string pool if the reference didn't exist before.

When you use String s = new String(hi), java creates a new instance of the string, but when you use String s = "hi", java checks if there is an instance of word "hi" in the code or not and if it exists, it just returns the reference.

Since comparing strings is based on reference, intern() helps in you creating a reference and allows you to compare the contents of the strings.

When you use intern() in the code, it clears of the space used by the string referring to the same object and just returns the reference of the already existing same object in memory.

But in case of p5 when you are using:

String p5 = new String(p3);

Only contents of p3 are copied and p5 is created newly. So it is not interned.

So the output will be:

p1 and p2 are the same
p1 and p3 are the same
p1 and p4 are the same
p1 and p6 are the same when intern is used
p1 and p7 are the same

Answer 5

Java automatically interns String literals. This means that in many cases, the == operator appears to work for Strings in the same way that it does for ints or other primitive values.

Since interning is automatic for String literals, the intern() method is to be used on Strings constructed with new String()

Using your example:

String s1 = "Rakesh";
String s2 = "Rakesh";
String s3 = "Rakesh".intern();
String s4 = new String("Rakesh");
String s5 = new String("Rakesh").intern();

if ( s1 == s2 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s2 are same");  // 1.
}

if ( s1 == s3 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s3 are same" );  // 2.
}

if ( s1 == s4 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s4 are same" );  // 3.
}

if ( s1 == s5 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s5 are same" );  // 4.
}

will return:

s1 and s2 are same
s1 and s3 are same
s1 and s5 are same

In all the cases besides of s4 variable, a value for which was explicitly created using new operator and where intern method was not used on it's result, it is a single immutable instance that's being returned JVM's string constant pool.

Refer to JavaTechniques "String Equality and Interning" for more information.

Answer 6

On a recent project, some huge data structures were set up with data that was read in from a database (and hence not String constants/literals) but with a huge amount of duplication. It was a banking application, and things like the names of a modest set (maybe 100 or 200) corporations appeared all over the place. The data structures were already large, and if all those corp names had been unique objects they would have overflowed memory. Instead, all the data structures had references to the same 100 or 200 String objects, thus saving lots of space.

Another small advantage of interned Strings is that == can be used (successfully!) to compare Strings if all involved strings are guaranteed to be interned. Apart from the leaner syntax, this is also a performance enhancement. But as others have pointed out, doing this harbors a great risk of introducing programming errors, so this should be done only as a desparate measure of last resort.

The downside is that interning a String takes more time than simply throwing it on the heap, and that the space for interned Strings may be limited, depending on the Java implementation. It's best done when you're dealing with a known reasonable number of Strings with many duplications.