best way to append a substring to a StringBuilder/StringBuffer

I am looping through a long (but not huge) String and appending
bits of it to a StringBuilder. I find there are two obvious ways
to do the append() call.

StringBuilder sb = ...;
String source= ...;

// is this better?
sb.append( source.substring(nStart, nEnd) );

// or is this?
sb.append( source, nStart, nEnd );

My initial thought was that the one that doesn't call String.substring()
would be better (since a new String object doesn't have to be created)
but looking at the code that one seems to copy the chars one by one in
a loop, while the String.substring() one eventually uses System.arraycopy().

Any thoughts?

Brian,

The easiest way to tell would just time it. Run both methods (try with a large string) and see if there is any difference.

Jeff

Originally posted by Jeff Storey:
The easiest way to tell would just time it. Run both methods (try with a large string) and see if there is any difference.

Heh. I had trouble deciding whether to post in the Intermediate forum
or the Advanced one. I chose Advanced and it gets bumped to Beginner.

Anyway, for my app it doesn't really matter. Even though I'm doing it
in a loop, it's not really on a critical path. So I probably won't go to
the trouble of timing it. I just thought it was an interesting API issue.

One would think the single call to append(CharSequence s, int start, int end)
would be the way to go, I think, but looking at the JDK 1.5 implementation
it seems not. It doesn't seem to be optimized for the case when the Char-
Sequence happens to be a String, even though append(CharSequence s) is.

On the otherhand, String.subString() is surprisingly time-efficient (some-
times at the expense of keeping a large array un-garbage-collectable).

I wonder if the same is true with other JDKs, and if using a StringBuffer
instead of a StringBuilder.

[edit: oops--fix broken URL]
[ April 11, 2008: Message edited by: Brian Cole ]

Originally posted by Brian Cole:

I wonder if the same is true with other JDKs, and if using a StringBuffer
instead of a StringBuilder.

StringBuffer and StringBuilder, both are almost identical classes except the methods in StringBuffer are thread safe (synchronised). So definitely, StringBuilder works faster.

Originally posted by Vishal Pandya:
StringBuffer and StringBuilder, both are almost identical classes except the methods in StringBuffer are thread safe (synchronised). So definitely, StringBuilder works faster.

Understood. What I meant was I'm interested in the efficiency trade-offs between sb.append(source.substring(nStart, nEnd)) and
sb.append(source, nStart, nEnd) on StringBuilder and also on StringBuffer. I wouldn't say it's likely, but it could be that one is better on StringBuilder and the other is better on StringBuffer.