When should we use intern method of String on String literals

According to String#intern(), intern method is supposed to return the String from the String pool if the String is found in String pool, otherwise a new string object will be added in String pool and the reference of this String is returned.

So i tried this:

String s1 = "Rakesh";
String s2 = "Rakesh";
String s3 = "Rakesh".intern();

if ( s1 == s2 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s2 are same");  // 1.
}

if ( s1 == s3 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s3 are same" );  // 2.
}

I was expecting that s1 and s3 are same will be printed as s3 is interned, and s1 and s2 are same will not be printed. But the result is: both lines are printed. So that means, by default String constants are interned. But if it is so, then why do we need the intern method? In other words when should we use this method?

Java automatically interns String literals. This means that in many cases, the == operator appears to work for Strings in the same way that it does for ints or other primitive values.

Since interning is automatic for String literals, the intern() method is to be used on Strings constructed with new String()

Using your example:

String s1 = "Rakesh";
String s2 = "Rakesh";
String s3 = "Rakesh".intern();
String s4 = new String("Rakesh");
String s5 = new String("Rakesh").intern();

if ( s1 == s2 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s2 are same");  // 1.
}

if ( s1 == s3 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s3 are same" );  // 2.
}

if ( s1 == s4 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s4 are same" );  // 3.
}

if ( s1 == s5 ){
    System.out.println("s1 and s5 are same" );  // 4.
}

will return:

s1 and s2 are same
s1 and s3 are same
s1 and s5 are same

In all the cases besides of s4 variable, a value for which was explicitly created using new operator and where intern method was not used on it's result, it is a single immutable instance that's being returned JVM's string constant pool.

Refer to JavaTechniques "String Equality and Interning" for more information.

On a recent project, some huge data structures were set up with data that was read in from a database (and hence not String constants/literals) but with a huge amount of duplication. It was a banking application, and things like the names of a modest set (maybe 100 or 200) corporations appeared all over the place. The data structures were already large, and if all those corp names had been unique objects they would have overflowed memory. Instead, all the data structures had references to the same 100 or 200 String objects, thus saving lots of space.

Another small advantage of interned Strings is that == can be used (successfully!) to compare Strings if all involved strings are guaranteed to be interned. Apart from the leaner syntax, this is also a performance enhancement. But as others have pointed out, doing this harbors a great risk of introducing programming errors, so this should be done only as a desparate measure of last resort.

The downside is that interning a String takes more time than simply throwing it on the heap, and that the space for interned Strings may be limited, depending on the Java implementation. It's best done when you're dealing with a known reasonable number of Strings with many duplications.