What is the base container in Java String?

Question

Is it just a char array?

Answer 1

Yes, as well as some metadata, such as the start and end index (since this char array can be split between lines, for example, when creating substrings).

Looking at the source java.lang.String , you will see the following instance fields:

 /** The value is used for character storage. */ private final char value[]; /** The offset is the first index of the storage that is used. */ private final int offset; /** The count is the number of characters in the String. */ private final int count; /** Cache the hash code for the string */ private int hash; // Default to 0