First method of the article is charAt... Great start! Then you realise this is probably every method available order alphabetically... This could be reduce to a "5 methods to know" to be really interesting.

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In simplest terms, a String is an collection (referred to in programming as an "array") of characters. If you wanted to have a String that said "Reddit", it would literally be an array of character values ['R', 'e', 'd', 'd', 'i', 't']. The most fundamental difference between strings and primitive types such as "int" are that primitives are single values. Strings are collections of values (specifically, a collection of characters.) Characters themselves are primitive types. In addition, primitive types are pieces of data. Strings are objects, which are instances of classes. As far as classes go...basically, the people who made Java built a lot of code so Strings could be easy to use by programmers. (This is also why "String" is capitalized: the name of the class has a capital S.) Sorry if this is too technical...but it should answer your questions. More on reddit.com

Looks like they're taking the awful PHP "real_escape_string" approach to API development of finding increasingly strained synonyms when something needs to be fixed by making the Unicode-aware version of String.trim() be named String.strip() instead of just adding an overload for trim() that takes an option parameter to specify the trimming type.

A hypothetical alternative of trim(StringTrimOptions options), used as in these examples:

// First two are equivalent, and use the backward-compatible
// pre-existing trimming logic
str.trim();
str.trim(StringTrimOptions.ASCII_WHITESPACE);

// This example uses new Unicode-compatible trimming logic.
str.trim(StringTrimOptions.UNICODE_WHITESPACE);

... would be a much better solution that wouldn't require every developer going forward, in perpetuity, to have to discover what the non-obvious difference between trim() and strip() is (whereas the hypothetical StringTrimOptions alternative is self-explanatory to a large extent); and is forward-compatible should the need ever arise in the future for yet another type of string trimming.

(And with the isBlank() method being added too, which could probably also benefit from being able to specify the type of whitespace; maybe instead of StringSplitOptions the argument should be WhitespaceType instead so an overload ofisBlank() could read correctly with it too.)

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Sure, there could be a nice validation utility in the JDK for this. But not on String. ... That's certainly another way around it, but it's still not the direct, simple method that it should be. Moreover, I imagine the overhead is quite significant using Scanner, but I'm not sure. Thanks for letting me know Scanner could be used on string vars though. I wasn't aware of this until now. ... I'd rather have a "test-and-convert" like C# has. ... Yes! That would be even nicer. Please Java... More on reddit.com