Strings and Characters

It is natural to think of a char as a String of length 1. Unfortunately, in Java the char and String types are incompatible since a String is an object and a char is a primitive type. This means that you cannot use a String in place of a char or use a char in place of a String.

Extracting a char from within a String can be accomplished using the charAt method as previously described.

Conversion from char to String can be accomplished by using the "+" (concatenation) operator described previously. Concatenating any char with an empty string (String of length zero) results in a string that consists of that char. The java notation for an empty string is two consecutive double quotation marks. For example, to convert myChar to a String it is added to “”.

char myChar = ‘X’;
String myString = "" + myChar;
System.out.println(myString);
char anotherChar = ‘Y’;
myString += anotherChar;
System.out.println(myString);

The output of this block of code would be:

X
XY