StringBuffer & StringBuilder and equals()

[Phillip Wells]

Hi all,
I hope you are well.
Am I correct in thinking that the StringBuffer and StringBuilder classes DO NOT override the Object equals() method? So their versions of equals() uses "=="? Is this a valid work around?
I am away from my normal PC at present and do not have a JDK installed on this one or I'd check it out myself.

stringbuffer1 = "hi"';
stringbuffer2 = "hi";
System.out.println((stringbuffer1.toString()).equals(stringbuffer2.toString())); // will it print true?

Is it the same situation for StringBuilder?

[Jesper de Jong]

Phillip Wells wrote:Am I correct in thinking that the StringBuffer and StringBuilder classes DO NOT override the Object equals() method?

If you look at the API documentation for those classes you'll see that they both don't override equals(), so they inherit the default equals() from Object, which compares objects using ==.

If you want to check whether two StringBuffers or StringBuilders have the same content, then your workaround (calling toString() on them) is valid.

[Phillip Wells]

Excellent, thanks very much Jesper.

[Shanky Sohar]

i understand everything what there in tutorial,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

but i am not able to point out the difference in between the two............
stringBuffer and StringBuilder

[Siva Masilamani]

Methods in StringBuilder are not thread safe.

[Phillip Wells]

Hi Shanky,
The difference is that StringBuffer's important methods are synchronized, StringBuilder's are not. Lol "snap" Siva

[Jim Hoglund]

So be sure to use StringBuilder unless you are working with shared data.
In that case, use StringBuffer.

Jim ... ...

[Jesper de Jong]

You may now be wondering why we have two classes that do almost the same (StringBuffer and StringBuilder):

StringBuilder is a new class, added in Java 5. It (more or less) replaces StringBuffer, and you should always prefer StringBuilder above StringBuffer - StringBuffer should be regarded as a legacy class.

The difference is, as already said, that most methods in StringBuffer are synchronized, while they are not in StringBuilder. The engineers at Sun realized that for most applications, synchronization is not necessary, but it does add some runtime overhead.

This is similar to Vector and ArrayList, or Hashtable and HashMap.

Jim Hoglund wrote:So be sure to use StringBuilder unless you are working with shared data.
In that case, use StringBuffer.

To make this more precise: If you use it from multiple threads at the same time (which you almost never do), use StringBuffer. In all other cases (almost always), use StringBuilder.