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Index › Programming Questions & Help › Syntax Questions › How to Fill a String
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How to Fill a String? (Read 590 times)
alphachapmtl
How to Fill a String?
Aug 26th, 2007, 4:19am  
int n=5;  char c='-';  How to make a string of n c's ?

Of course I can do:  String s="-----";

But generally? Is there a better way than this:

String s="";
for (int i=0;i<n;i++) s=s+c;
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sohcahtoa
Re: How to Fill a String?
Reply #1 - Aug 26th, 2007, 1:11pm  
Hi, you should know that Strings are final, meaning that everytime you want to change a string Java internally creates a new stringobject with the new value and rereferences the new string with the original string name, thus adding the original instance to the garbage collector.

IMHO the better and faster way would be to use the StringBuffer Class.

Code:

void setup(){
  String s;
  StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(1000);
  for (int i=0; i< 1000; i++){
    sb.append("x");
  }
  s = sb.toString();
  println(s);
}


Here's a read for more information:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/lang/StringBuffer.html
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fry
Re: How to Fill a String?
Reply #2 - Aug 26th, 2007, 9:54pm  
though if you're using chars, append('-') will be more efficient than append("-").

for a couple letters this works fine.. if you need a thousand of them, you might be better off using the java method Arrays.fill(). to create a big char[] array, and then calling "new String()" on that.
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