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Jon Skeet
Difference between two String constructors
I'm wondering the difference between the following 2 statements:
String str = new String(new char[]{'a', 'b'});
and
String str = new String(new byte[]{'a', 'b'});
I get the same thing in the outcome. The only difference i can think of is that
i don't have to convert the array type to byte[] when i have a char[] and vice versa.
TIA.
The difference is that the first is just taking a character array and creating a string of the same length, with the same char contents. The second is decoding from bytes to chars - using the platform default encoding in this case. You can specify the encoding with another constructor argument, and indeed you should almost always do so. (It's very rarely a good idea to use the platform default encoding - and when you want to do so, it's clearer if you do so explicitly.)
For the values of 'a' and 'b' it's unlikely that there'll be a difference in results - although the platform default encoding could be EBCDIC or something else similarly non-ASCII-compatible. But it's worth understanding that fundamentally these are two different operations.
It's a little bit like constructing an image, where the first form would be passing in an array of a mythical PixelColor type, whereas the second form would be more like saying "load it from this PNG file".
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