char compilation process

[Zack]

I got into thinking about security the other night and was thinking about String comparisons; perhaps instead of a String, there could be some class that holds a char[] full of data that represents the String:

Such that:
"Hello" == 'H' + 'e' + 'l' + 'l' + 'o' == {72, 101, 108, 108, 111}

Obviously you could have some kind of compareTo() method that compared to a String by converting it to a char array... (Might be a tad inefficient for security's sake.)

So the question here is... Could this be a more secure way of containing strings; particularly for those applications/applets (server-communication and such) that have sensitive data in them?

And the secondary question is: Do char objects render to some kind of int data on compile-time? That is, if I do a test for "if (a == 'a')", does that compile to "if(a==97)"?

[DarrylBurke]

char is an integer type. And it's a primitive so there's no such thing as "char objects"

Types, Values, and Variables
Lexical Structure

db

[JosAH]

So the question here is... Could this be a more secure way of containing strings; particularly for those applications/applets (server-communication and such) that have sensitive data in them?

And the secondary question is: Do char objects render to some kind of int data on compile-time? That is, if I do a test for "if (a == 'a')", does that compile to "if(a==97)"?

The answer is encryption; every not encrypted sequence of chars is open to malicious attacks. Your second question: a char in Java is like an unsigned short in C or C++; 'a' is just symbolic way of saying (char)97. a == 'a' is translated to a == (char)97; evaluation of the expression causes a widening conversion on the rhs so the expression boils down to a == 97.

kind regards,

Jos

[Zack]

Thank you to you both, that's what I needed!