Java How to Program Fourth Edition - DCC

Chapter 10 Strings and Characters 545
compared. Thus, if the String "hello" is compared with the String "HELLO", the
result is false, because the integer representation of a lowercase letter is different from
that of the corresponding uppercase letter.
The condition in the if structure at line 31 uses the equality operator == to compare
String s1 for equality with the anonymous String "hello". Operator == has different
functionality when it is used to compare references and when it is used to compare
values of primitive data types. When primitive data type values are compared with ==, the
result is true if both values are identical. When references are compared with ==, the
result is true if both references refer to the same object in memory. To compare the actual
contents (or state information) of objects for equality, methods (such as equals) must be
invoked. The preceding condition evaluates to false in this program because the reference
s1 was initialized with the statement
s1 = new String( "hello" );
which creates a new String object with a copy of anonymous String "hello" and
assigns the new object to reference s1. If s1 had been initialized with the statement
s1 = "hello";
which directly assigns the anonymous String "hello" to the reference s1, the condition
would be true. Remember that Java treats all anonymous String objects with the
same contents as one anonymous String object that has many references. Thus, lines 16,
25 and 31 all refer to the same anonymous String object "hello" in memory.
Common Programming Error 10.3
Comparing references with == can lead to logic errors, because == compares the references
to determine whether they refer to the same object, not whether two objects have the same
contents. When two identical (but separate) objects are compared with ==, the result will be
false. When comparing objects to determine whether they have the same contents, use
method equals. 10.3
If you are sorting Strings, you may compare them for equality with method
equalsIgnoreCase, which ignores the case of the letters in each String when performing
the comparison. Thus, the String "hello" and the String "HELLO" compare
as equal. The if structure at line 37 uses String method equalsIgnoreCase to
compare String s3—Happy Birthday—for equality with String s4—happy
birthday. The result of this comparison is true, because the comparison ignores case
sensitivity.
Lines 44–48 use String method compareTo to compare String objects. For
example, line 44 compares String s1 to String s2. Method compareTo returns 0 if
the Strings are equal, a negative number if the String that invokes compareTo is
less than the String that is passed as an argument and a positive number if the String
that invokes compareTo is greater than the String that is passed as an argument.
Method compareTo uses a lexicographical comparison—it compares the numeric values
of corresponding characters in each String.
The condition in the if structure at line 52 uses String method regionMatches
to compare portions of two String objects for equality. The first argument is the starting
index in the String that invokes the method. The second argument is a comparison
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