String and character array difference

HariNagarjuna

This is what I understood about difference between strings and array of characters so far and unicode(U+0000 to U+FFFF).

1.Unicode of BMP is combination of 0's and 1's and gives 65,536(2^16 or 16^4) characters.

2.character array can only contain this 65,536 BMP unicode characters.

3.String can have things other than unicode characters in BMP(65,536 characters).

please correct me if I am wrong.

OrhanCemalDuru

Character encoding tables vary, the class String is, as far as I am concerned, capable of displaying, formatting, and manipulating characters of any encoding type.

The numbers you give relate to INTEGER_MAX value which also applies to memory allocation of arrays (taking into account the data type). For instance if you have a byte array of length INTEGER_MAX, you get INTEGER_MAX bytes of memory allocated for use. I'm not sure if all encoding tables use a fixed amount of memory, ones I know use a single byte for a single character. So there are 2^8 possible different representations for each character set. That makes 256 unique representations.