What's the quickest way to compare strings in Java?

Question

What\'s the quickest to compare two strings in Java?

Is there something faster than equals?

EDIT: I can not help much to clarify the problem.

I have

Answer 1

If you can show that it's a significant bottleneck, which would surprise me, you could try

s1.hashCode() == s2.hashCode() && s1.equals(s2)

It might be a bit faster. It mightn't.