How can I initialize a String array with length 0 in Java?

Question

The Java Docs for the method
String[] java.io.File.list(FilenameFilter filter)
includes this in the returns description:

The arra

Answer 1

As others have said,

new String[0]

will indeed create an empty array. However, there's one nice thing about arrays - their size can't change, so you can always use the same empty array reference. So in your code, you can use:

private static final String[] EMPTY_ARRAY = new String[0];

and then just return EMPTY_ARRAY each time you need it - there's no need to create a new object each time.