Question

String contains a bunch of useful methods such as String.replace(CharSequence, CharSequence) that are completely missing from StringBuilder. Is there a reason why?

Is there an easy way to implement these methods without the huge overhead of invoking StringBuilder.toString() which copies the string every time?

Answer 1

Since StringBuilder provides both indexOf(String,int) and replace(int,int,String) one can easily reproduce the functionality. The only drawback here is that the arguments can’t be any CharSequence objects, but must be Strings instead.

When handling huge string-like objects and doing lots of replace operations, then a specialized API like Ropes for Java could be used.