What's the length of a string? [duplicate]

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how many characters can a Java string开发者_运维百科 have?

How many characters can a string hold at it's maximum. (java)

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heap memory is the limit OR the Integer.MAX_VALUE which ever is smaller.

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A lot. Specifically, there does not seem to be any limit, though you will eventually out-of-memory. See the JVM spec for more info, or lack of info: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/second_edition/html/Concepts.doc.html#25486

EDIT: It looks like Java (the language) allows you to to make a string the length of any single variable, which is probably the amount of heapspace Java has allocated. (see the -Xmx argument).

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In theory: 2^31 - 1 = 2147483647 (~2 GigaByte). In practice: end of virtual memory.

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Since String is based on an underlying char[], and array indices are int values, the maximum length of a String is Integer.MAX_VALUE, though you'll probably run into memory issues before that.