StringBuilder : Java Glossary

StringBuilder

Allows you to edit Strings in JDK 1.5+. In prior JDK’s, use the slower StringBuffer.

StringBuilder.insert, delete and replace are fairly expensive operations since they have to shift the everything past that point to make room or squeeze up. With replace, if the replacement String is the same length as the one replaced, you don’t have this problem.

To find out how many chars are in a StringBuilder altready use length( );

To reuse a StringBuilder use setLength( 0 );

If you know the precise length of the String you are building in advance, usually you can build it more efficiently with a char[] ca and use new String( ca ) to convert the result.

Estimating Initial Size

It is important to get a good initial estimate for the StringBuilder size. If you guess too small, it will have to take time out to allocate a buffer double the size, copy over the partially built String. Further, you will have two char[] objects cluttering the heap instead of just one. If you guess too large, you will nail down space needlessly for the internal buffer. Here is some code to monitor your estimates, allowing you to monitor them. Tweak the buffer sizes and permissible limits until your program stops emitting error messsages when it runs. If you don’t specify any size, the constructor will assume 16 bytes. Hint: sort the error messages and eliminate duplicates before examining them.

I used this method to optimise the initial sizes of the StringBuilders used in the static macros program that expands the macros used to generate the mindprod.com website. It does a great many StringBuilder. appends, though it also does a fair bit of I/O as well, since it has to read each file in the website. Here are the results:

Effect of StringBuilder Optimising
	Time Before Optimising	Time After Optimising	% improvement
Sun	27.5 sec	24 sec	13%
Jet	25 sec	22.5 sec	10%

A cleverer version of this program would collect the actual range of values for each StringBuilder and report them, along with a report on which bounds are dangerously tight or overly loose. It might even give you an idea of the distribution so you could deliberately allow rare cases to be handled outside the range. You could implement this fairly simply by logging the current StringBuffer size and the call point values to a CSV or DataOutputStream file, then sorting it and picking out the low and high values. You could also do it, albeit more slowly, by looking up database records and maintaining the lowest and highest length seen for each StringBuilder. You would not want this turned on in production, but the simple bounds check in checkStringBuilderEstimate has almost no overhead.

StringBuilder is the usual choice, preferably with an high-side estimate of the final length.
StringBuffer is for old JDKs.
StringWriter is for when you have code that was originally designed to write files.

You can use a ByteArrayStream as a sort of StringBuilder for bytes.

Learning More

Sun’s Javadoc on StringBuilder class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_17 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_22 on your local Windows J: drive.

Sun’s Javadoc on String class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_17 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_22 on your local Windows J: drive.

CharSequence
concatenation
FileIO: for sample code to use StringWriter
String
StringBuffer

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