Question

Lets say you have a class SomeClass which has its own implementation of toString(), and also has the ability to parse a new instance of itself by reading that same string.

Which of these methods do you prefer, or find better to use? You can either define it as another constructor:

public SomeClass(String serializedString); 

or you can define it as a static method, which in turn creates a new instance (by one of the other constructors, does some with it, and returns the new instance:

public static SomeClass toObject(String serializedString); 

Does it even matter? (my hunch is there is no case this matters, but I am trying to make sure)

Answer 1

My own preference is to keep the parsing logic out of the constructor. That way it can call the appropriate constructors (possibly private) as necessary. It doesn’t have to depend on default object construction and so on. So I would go with the toSomeClass() method.

Also, it is not immediately clear that SomeClass(String) will parse an object based on the serialization string. There may be many other meanings to a constructor which takes a String. The toSomeClass() static method makes this clear.