Serialized object size issue

Hi all,

I am new to java object serialization.

I have a requirement to compare the byte size of a string aganist the byte size of its serilaized version.

I wrote a small test to understand. I used a empty String and its byte size is zero. But the byte size of the serialized version is 7 bytes.

Q1) How is that possible?

Q2) Also I need to some how make the byte size of seriliazed version match the original String size which is zero? How do I accomplish this?

Any input at the earliest is highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your valuable input and time.

How are you measuring the byte size of both values?

joe nesbitt wrote:I wrote a small test to understand. I used a empty String and its byte size is zero. But the byte size of the serialized version is 7 bytes.

Q1) How is that possible?

When you serialize an object, let's say a String, the information which is stored enables anything else to recognize that it is a serialized String. So it's necessary to store information which describes the object as well as storing the contents of the object

Q2) Also I need to some how make the byte size of seriliazed version match the original String size which is zero? How do I accomplish this?

I don't know what "match" means there. If your requirement is that serializing an empty string writes zero bytes, then obviously that's a requirement that can't be implemented.