Scala: String vs RichString oddities

Update: In Scala 2.8, the below is no longer true. String.reverse now returns a String rather than a RichString:

scala> "a".reverse == "a"
res0: Boolean = true

=========================================

In the Scala programming language, there is a class called RichString, that adds features to the underlying Java String. In the current version of Scala (2.7.2.final), this leads to some odd behaviour:

"Im a string" == "Im a string".reverse.reverse

returns false, while

"Im a string" == "Im a string".reverse.reverse.toString

returns true!

Just to make your head spin, the following code does indeed work as expected:

val str :String = "Im a string".reverse.reverse
println(str == "Im a string") // prints "true"

while

val str = "Im a string".reverse.reverse
println(str == "Im a string") // prints "false"

does not.



The explanation is that String.reverse returns a RichString, and that == returns false when comparing a String and a RichString, even though it is the "same" string (as in the example above).

If I understand it correctly, this oddity will be fixed in future releases of Scala.

(And no, Scala's == is not the same as Java's ditto. It means "equal objects" rather than "refers to the same instance of an object".)

Scala mailing list item here.

Don't concatenate Java strings using +=

The other day, I ran into a Java performance problem. It was an extremely simple Scanner loop, reading a file of some 20,000 lines of text, concatenating the lines into one single string:

Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File(fName), "UTF8");
String result = "";
while(sc.hasNextLine())
{
  result += sc.nextLine(); //Avoid this!
}

// Do something with result

The above loop took incredible long time to finish, and I had no clue of what could possibly be wrong. A colleague glanced at the code and said "StringBuilder". I had forgotten about the poor performance of string concatenation using += (or +). I must have thought that this was a problem of the past.

Removing the += part for a StringBuilder resulted in excellent performance:

Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File(fName), "UTF8");
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
while (sc.hasNextLine()) 
{
  result.append(sc.nextLine());
}

// Do something with result.toString

Update: ttaveira points out that you may gain some additional speed by initializing the StringBuilder to a suitable capacity. See the comment below.