Question

I am having some difficulty in understanding how to write the below piece of code using String or char[] in Java.

void xyz(char *a, int startIndex, int endIndex)
{
   int j;
   for (j = startIndex; j <= endIndex; j++)
   {
       doThis((a+startIndex), (a+j));
       xyz(a, startIndex+1, endIndex);
   }
}

Here char *a points to the starting location of the char name[]

The above are just some random functions, but I just want the logic of how to use char* and character index char[] in Java

Answer 1

Based on the rephrased question from the comment thread:

You cannot change the characters of a Java String. If you need to modify a sequence of characters, use StringBuilder, which supports setCharAt(int, char), insert(int, char), and append(char). You can use new StringBuilder(myString) to convert a String to a StringBuilder, and stringBuilder.toString() to convert back.

This is perfectly legit Java code — it’s not code smelly, it’s just the way you work with mutable character sequences.