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Cloning Objects of String and Integer classes

 
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While working on an issue recently, I came across a problem where I thought that cloning a hashmap(having some integers and strings) would solve the problem.
However when I read more about what the method does, I found that it does a shallow copy of hashmap object and the objects are not actually copied.
Hence I thought to iterate through the hashmap and call clone of each key-value pair, but i found out that String and Integers (in fact all the wrapper classes) doesn't support clone.

My question is - why these classes don’t support clone method and what are the other intelligent ways to clone object of these classes?

Also it seems weird that clone method is object class and not in Cloneable object.
What is the reason behind this design decision?

 
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Yes, it might be more sensible to have the clone method as part of a Cloneable interface, but it is too late to change now.
Integer, String etc don't need to be cloned because they are immutable classes.
 
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Swapnil Shroff wrote:Also it seems weird that clone method is object class and not in Cloneable object.
What is the reason behind this design decision?


The base of just about all clone() implementations is a call to super.clone(). That is only possible if all classes have the clone() method, and that can only be done by putting it in Object.
Cloneable could have had clone() as well, but because it's an interface that would require the clone() method to become public. For some reason Sun decided that would be a bad idea. Possibly because that way you cannot write clone() methods that should be used for internal use only.
 
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Swapnil Shroff wrote:My question is - why these classes don’t support clone method and what are the other intelligent ways to clone object of these classes?


The String and wrapper classes are immutable (read: the objects of this class can't change). When you want to clone an object of this class just use the reference
to the original object. No operation can change the value so there will be no problem that you have 2 references to the same object.
 
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Rob Prime wrote:because it's an interface that would require the clone() method to become public. For some reason Sun decided that would be a bad idea. Possibly because that way you cannot write clone() methods that should be used for internal use only.


I found this bug. http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4098033.
 
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