What is the easiest/best/most correct way to iterate through the characters of a string in Java?

Question

StringTokenizer? Convert the String to a char[] and iterate over that? Something else?

Answer 1

StringTokenizer is totally unsuited to the task of breaking a string into its individual characters. With String#split() you can do that easily by using a regex that matches nothing, e.g.:

String[] theChars = str.split("|");

But StringTokenizer doesn't use regexes, and there's no delimiter string you can specify that will match the nothing between characters. There is one cute little hack you can use to accomplish the same thing: use the string itself as the delimiter string (making every character in it a delimiter) and have it return the delimiters:

StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(str, str, true);

However, I only mention these options for the purpose of dismissing them. Both techniques break the original string into one-character strings instead of char primitives, and both involve a great deal of overhead in the form of object creation and string manipulation. Compare that to calling charAt() in a for loop, which incurs virtually no overhead.