padding space in update code

[Tim Fernandez]

Hi All,

Ive seen some codes in some posts about writing padded Strings to the db file and most of them use the System.arraycopy.. Now im worried that my code below is not efficient as compared to the others. Is my code ok?

  
 
String[] padRecordData(String[] recData) {
         String[] paddedRecordData = new String[recData.length];
         for (int i = 0; i < recData.length; i++) {
         int fieldLen = DBConstants.FIELDLENGTHS[i];
         if (recData[i].length() < fieldLen) {
         paddedRecordData[i] = padString(recData[i], fieldLen - recData[i].length());
         } else {
         paddedRecordData[i] = recData[i];
         }
         }
         return paddedRecordData;
         }
         
String padString(String data, int length) {
         StringBuffer paddedString = new StringBuffer(data);
         for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) {
         paddedString.append(" ");
         }
         return paddedString.toString();
         }
 

[Christian P�cher]

Well, I understood the code within 30 secs and when you write documentation for the method, I would have been even faster. My assignment - as well as my experience - says you should prefer clarity over minor speed improvments. The code is readable, so it is ok. If you are really concerned about speed, I would take a profiler and fix hotspots first.

HTH, chris

[Tim Fernandez]

more readable than this?

 
for (int i = 0; i < DBConstants.NUMOFFIELDS; i++) {
    
    /** field lengths declared as array of strings in constants class */
    byte[] paddedField = new byte[DBConstants.FIELDLENGTH[i].length];
    String strField = data[i];
    byte[] byteField = strField.getBytes(DBConstans.CHARSET);
    System.arraycopy(byteField, 0, paddedField, 0, byteField.length);
    rFile.writeBytes(paddedField);
}