Strings in Java : equals vs == [duplicate]

Answer 1

When you use == on strings, only the references are compared. Thus, == is only guaranteed to return true in situations like:

String s1 = "...";
String s2 = s1;    // reference assignment!

Here, s1 == s2. In all other situations, == may or may not return true even if the two strings contain the same character sequence.

To compare the contents of the two strings, use equals():

if (s1.equals(s2)) {
   ...
}