java x.length,在Java中，对于字符串x，s.length（）的运行时成本是多少？是O（1）还是O（n）？...

I've been told that code such as:

for (int i = 0; i < x.length(); i++) {

// blah

}

is actually O(n^2) because of the repeated calls to x.length(). Instead I should use:

int l = x.length();

for (int i = 0; i < l; i++) {

// blah

}

Is this true? Is string length stored as a private integer attribute of the String class? Or does String.length() really walk the whole string just to determine its length?

解决方案

No, the length of a java string is O(1) because java's string class stores the length as a field.

The advice you've received is true of C, amongst other languages, but not java. C's strlen walks the char array looking for the end-of-string character. Joel's talked about it on the podcast, but in the context of C.