How can I concatenate two arrays in Java?

Question

I need to concatenate two String arrays in Java.

void f(String[] first, String[] second) {
    String[] both = ???
}

What is t

Answer 1

I've recently fought problems with excessive memory rotation. If a and/or b are known to be commonly empty, here is another adaption of silvertab's code (generified too):

private static  T[] concatOrReturnSame(T[] a, T[] b) {
    final int alen = a.length;
    final int blen = b.length;
    if (alen == 0) {
        return b;
    }
    if (blen == 0) {
        return a;
    }
    final T[] result = (T[]) java.lang.reflect.Array.
            newInstance(a.getClass().getComponentType(), alen + blen);
    System.arraycopy(a, 0, result, 0, alen);
    System.arraycopy(b, 0, result, alen, blen);
    return result;
}

Edit: A previous version of this post stated that array re-usage like this shall be clearly documented. As Maarten points out in the comments it would in general be better to just remove the if statements, thus voiding the need for having documentation. But then again, those if statements were the whole point of this particular optimization in the first place. I'll leave this answer here, but be wary!