immutable String objects

[Rahil Hurzuk]

Hi All


A newbie question

Say if I have a String objects

String s = "nothing special"; //line1
s = s.toUpperCase(); //line2

Now the s object reference in line2 is a new one & different from the 1 created initially at line1 as Strings are immutable objects

My question is what happens to the previous String object (s) in this case

Do respond

Rgrds

Rahil

[Paul Sturrock]

It still exists in memory, though now there is no reference pointing to it so you can't use it, and presumably it will get Garbage Collected at some time.

[Jeroen Wenting]

Strings in the String object pool don't typically get garbage collected unless the pool runs into capacity problems (in which case the JVM can decide to do something, possibly based on last access time).