Question

I saw a few old code snippets in a piece of software that no one remembers who wrote that instead of doing something like:

String abc = SOME_CONSTANT.toLowerCase()

They do:

String abc = new String(SOME_CONSTANT).toLowerCase()

I can’t see any value in this – seems like plain old bad programming (e.g. not understanding that String is immutable). Anyone can see a good reason for this?

Note: SOME_CONSTANT is defined as –

public static final String SOME_CONSTANT = "Some value";

Answer 1

The only point in wrapping a String inside another String is to force a copy. e.g.

String str = "A very very log string .......";
// uses the same underlying string which we might not need after this.
String str1 = str.substring(0, 1); 
// take a copy of which only has one char in it.
String str2 = new String(str1);

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I would just do

public static final String SOME_CONSTANT = "Some value";
public static final String LOWER_CONSTANT = SOME_CONSTANT.toLowerCase();