Question

In my recent posts about using or omitting a “new” keyword in Scala ( "new" keyword in Scala) I was told that the omission comes from the fact that certain classes have companion objects defined with apply method on them. My question is: are we able to tell or is there any general rule to distinguish which classes/objects have a companion object and apply method?

Thanks in advance and sorry of it’s a stupid question, but coming from a Java background it is a bit confusing.

Answer 1

In the Scala API documentation, you see a little icon in the list on the left side. If you click on that, you go to the documentation of the companion object of the class or trait that’s mentioned.

Most of the collection classes and many other classes in the standard library have companion objects with apply methods.

For case classes, the Scala compiler automatically creates a companion object with an apply method (as well as other methods).