Programming in Android, most of the text values are expected in CharSequence.
Why is that ? What is the benefit and what are the main impacts of using CharSequence over String ?
What are the main differences, and what issues are expected, while using them, and converting from one to another ?
Source: Tips4all
Strings are CharSequences, so you can just use Strings and not worry. Android is merely trying to be helpful by allowing you to also specify other CharSequence objects, like StringBuffers.
ReplyDeleteIn general using an interface allows you to vary the implementation with minimal collateral damage. Although java.lang.String are super popular it may be possible that in certain contexts one may want to use another implementation. By building the API around CharSequences rather than Strings the code gives one the opportunity to do that.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is best to use CharSequence. The reason is that String implements CharSequence, therefore you can pass a String into a CharSequence, HOWEVER you cannot pass a CharSequence into a String, as CharSequence doesn't not implement String. ALSO, in Android the EditText.getText() method returns an Editable, which also implements CharSequence and can be passed easily into one, while not easily into a String. CharSequence handles all!
ReplyDeleteThis is almost certainly performance reasons. For example, imagine a parser that goes through a 500k ByteBuffer containing strings.
ReplyDeleteThere are 3 approaches to returning the string content:
1. Build a String[] at parse time, one character at a time. This will take a noticeable amount of time. We can use == instead of .equals to compare cached references.
Build a int[] with offsets at parse time, then dynamically build String when a get() happens. Each String will be a new object, so no caching returned values and using ==
Build a CharSequence[] at parse time. Since no new data is stored (other than offsets into the byte buffer), the parsing is much lower that #1. At get time, we don't need to build a String, so get performance is equal to #1 (much better than #2), as we're only returning a reference to an existing object.
In addition to the processing gains you get using CharSequence, you also reduce the memory footprint by not duplicating data. For example, if you have a buffer containing 3 paragraphs of text, and want to return either all 3 or a single paragraph, you need 4 Strings to represent this. Using CharSequence you only need 1 buffer with the data, and 4 instances of a CharSequence implementation that tracks the start and length.
Phil Lello