Top 15 Java String interview Question Answers for 3 to 5 Years Experienced

10 Java String interviews Question answers
String interview questions in Java is one of Integral part of any Core Java or J2EE interviews. No one can deny the importance of String and how much it is used in any Java application irrespective of whether it's core Java desktop application, web application, Enterprise application or Mobile application. The string is one of the fundamentals of Java programming language and correct understanding of String class is a must for every Java programmer. What makes String interview questions in Java even more interesting is the special status of String in terms of features and privileges it has like the + operator is kind of overloaded to perform String concatenation despite the fact that Java does not support operator overloading. There is a separate String pool to store String literal etc.

How to compare two String in Java - String Comparison Example

String comparison is a common programming task and Java provides several way to compare two String in Java. String is a special class in Java, String is immutable and It’s used a lot in every single Java program starting from simple test to enterprise Java application. In this Java String compare tutorial we will see different ways to compare two String in Java and find out how they compare String and when to use equals() or compareTo() for comparison etc.

Here are four examples of comparing String in Java

1) String comparison using equals method

2) String comparison using equalsIgnoreCase method

2) String comparison using compareTo method

4) String comparison using compareToIgnoreCase method

How to Remove First and Last Character of String in Java - Example Tutorial

You can use the substring() method of java.lang.String class to remove the first or last character of String in Java. The substring() method is overloaded and provides a couple of versions that allows you to remove a character from any position in Java. Alternatively, you can convert String to StringBuffer or StringBuilder and then use its remove() method to remove the first or last character. Both StringBuffer and StringBuilder provides a convenient deleteCharAt(int index) method which removes a character from the corresponding index. You can use this method to remove both first and last characters from String in Java.

How to get first and last character of String in Java - Example

You can get the first and last character of a String using the charAt() method in Java. This method accepts an integer index and returns the corresponding character from String. Since Java String is backed by an array, their index is also zero-based, which means the first character resides at index zero, and the last character is at index, length-1, where length is the number of characters in the String. You can get the length of the String by calling the length() method. The charAt() method is not defined on java.lang.String class, but on its super interface java.lang.CharSequence, hence it will also work for StringBuffer and StringBuilder.

How to check if String is not null and empty in Java? Example

In Java, since null and empty are two different concepts, it's a little bit tricky for beginners to check if a String is both not null and not empty. A String reference variable points to null if it has not been initialized and an empty String is a String without any character or a string of zero length. Remember, a String with just whitespace may not be considered as empty String by one program but considered as empty String by others, so, depending upon your situation, you can include the logic to check for that as well. A String with just white space is also referred to as a blank String in java. In this tutorial, I will teach you a couple of right ways to test if a String is not null and not empty in Java.

When to use intern() method of String in Java? Example

The String.intern() method can be used to deal with the String duplication problem in Java. By carefully using the intern() means you can save a lot of heap memory consumed by duplicate String objects. A String object is said to be duplicated if it contains the same content as another string but occupied a different memory location e.g. str1 != str2 but str1.equals(str2) is true. Since the String object consumes a large amount of heap memory in the average Java application, it makes sense to use the intern() method to reduce duplication and take advantage of the String pool feature provided by Java. You can use the intern() method to intern a String object and store them into the String pool for further reuse.

How to split a comma separated String in Java? Regular Expression Example

You can use the String.split() function or StringTokenizer class to split a comma-separated String in Java. Since splitting a String is a very common functionality, Java designers have provided a couple of split() methods on java.lang.String class itself. These split() function takes a regular expression and split the String accordingly. In order to parse a comma-delimited String, you can just provide a "," as a delimiter and it will return an array of String containing individual values. The split() function internally uses Java's regular expression API (java.util.regex) to do its job.

Why String is Immutable or Final in Java? Explained

The string is Immutable in Java because String objects are cached in the String pool. Since cached String literals are shared between multiple clients there is always a risk, where one client's action would affect all other clients. For example, if one client changes the value of the String "Test" to "TEST", all other clients will also see that value as explained in the first example. Since caching of String objects was important for performance reasons this risk was avoided by making the String class Immutable. At the same time, String was made final so that no one can compromise invariant of String class like Immutability, Caching, hashcode calculation, etc by extending and overriding behaviors. Another reason why the String class is immutable could die due to HashMap.

How to Convert an Array to Comma Separated String in Java - Example Tutorial

The simplest way to convert an array to comma separated String is to create a StringBuilder, iterate through the array, and add each element of the array into StringBuilder after appending the comma. You just need Java 1.5 for that, even if you are not running on Java 5, you can use StringBuffer in place of StringBuilder. The joining of String has got even easier in JDK 8, where you have got the join() method right in the String class itself. The join() method takes a delimiter and a source, which can be an array or collection, and returns a String where each element is joined by a delimiter.

How to remove all special characters from String in Java? Example Tutorial

You can use a regular expression and replaceAll() method of java.lang.String class to remove all special characters from String. A special character is nothing but characters like - ! #, %, etc. Precisely, you need to define what is a special character for you. Once you define that you can use a regular expression to replace those characters with empty String, which is equivalent to removing all special characters from String. For example, suppose, your String contains some special characters e.g. "Awesome!!!" and you want to remove those !!! to reduce some excitement, you can use replaceAll("!", "") to get rid of all exclamation marks from String.

StringTokenizer Example in Java with Multiple Delimiters - Example Tutorial

StringTokenizer is a legacy class for splitting strings into tokens. In order to break String into tokens, you need to create a StringTokenizer object and provide a delimiter for splitting strings into tokens. You can pass multiple delimiters e.g. you can break String into tokens by, and: at the same time. If you don't provide any delimiter then by default it will use white-space. It's inferior to split() as it doesn't support regular expression, also it is not very efficient. Since it’s an obsolete class, don't expect any performance improvement either. On the hand split() has gone some major performance boost on Java 7, see here to learn more about splitting String with regular expression.

How to replace a substring in Java? String replace() method Example Tutorial

You can replace a substring using replace() method in Java. The String class provides the overloaded version of the replace() method, but you need to use the replace(CharSequence target, CharSequence replacement). This version of the replace() method replaces each substring of this string (on which you call the replace() method) that matches the literal target sequence with the specified literal replacement sequence. For example, if you call "Effective Java".replace("Effective", "Head First") then it will replace "Effective" with "Head First" in the String "Effective Java". Since String is Immutable in Java, this call will produce a new String "Head First Java".

How to check if String contains another SubString in Java? contains() and indexOf() example

You can use contains(), indexOf() and lastIndexOf() method to check if one String contains another String in Java or not. If a String contains another String then it's known as a substring. The indexOf() method accepts a String and returns the starting position of the string if it exists, otherwise, it will return -1. For example "fastfood".indexOf("food") will return 4 but "fastfood".indexOf("Pizza") will return -1. This is the easiest way to test if one String contains another substring or not.

How to check if a String is numeric in Java? Use isNumeric() or isNumber() Example

In day-to-day programming, you often need to check if a given string is numeric or not. It's also a good interview question but that's a separate topic of discussion. Even though you can use Regular expression to check if the given String is empty or not, as shown here, they are not full proof to handle all kinds of scenarios, which common third-party libraries like Apache commons-lang will handle e.g. hexadecimal and octal String. Hence, In the Java application, the simplest way to determine if a String is a number or not is by using the Apache Commons lang's isNumber() method, which checks whether the String is a valid number in Java or not.

How to split String in Java by WhiteSpace or tabs? Example Tutorial

You can split a String by whitespaces or tabs in Java by using the split() method of java.lang.String class. This method accepts a regular expression and you can pass a regex matching with whitespace to split the String where words are separated by spaces. Though this is not as straightforward as it seems, especially if you are not coding in Java regularly. Input String may contain leading and trailing spaces, it may contain multiple white spaces between words and words may also be separated by tabs. Your solution needs to take care of all these conditions if you just want words and no empty String.