Difference between equals() and ==

Both the equals() method and the ‘==‘ operator are used to check the equality of objects, but there is a significant difference between equals() and ‘==‘.The equals method is present in the java.lang.Object class and is used to check the equivalence of the object, to check whether the contents are equal whereas ‘==‘ is used to check whether the actual instances of the object are the same or not.

Operator ‘==’

The ‘==‘ operator is used to check if both objects refer to the same location in memory.Let's see this in the example below

String str1 = new String("aroundcode");
String str2 = new String("aroundcode");
if(str1 == str2) {
System.out.println("The two objects are equal");
}
else {
System.out.println("The two objects are not equal");
}

If you guessed that 'both objects are equal', then you are wrong, because '==' checks memory, here str1 and str2 are present in different memory addresses, let's say str1 is at address 0x34567 and str2 is at address 0x15698, that's the reason we get 'both objects are not equal' although the contents are the same.

String str1 = new String("aroundcode");
String str2 = str1;
if(str1 == str2) {
System.out.println("The two objects are equal");
}
else {
System.out.println("The two objects are not equal");
}

while the above code will give you the expected result ‘Both objects are equal‘ because both objects refer to the same location in memory.

equals() method

equals method checks the contents of both str objects, we will get 'Both objects are equal' even if we compare the first example with equals() itself.

String str1 = new String("aroundcode");
String str2 = new String("aroundcode");
if(str1.equals(str2)) {
System.out.println("The two objects are equal");
}
else {
System.out.println("The two objects are not equal");
}

The String class overrides the equals method to compare whether the character in the string is equal.So, we get the true answer because both contain the same string ‘aroundcode’.

I hope this article was useful to you.Thanks for reading it.

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