Is String sequence of characters in Java?

Question

String s1 = "a";
System.out.println(s1.equals('a'));

Output:

False

Can anyone please explain me why is it coming false even though the string s1 has only one character 'a'.

Answer 1

To understand why are you getting false, which is unexpected for you. First, you need to understand your code

s1.equals('a')

s1 is a String and 'a' is Character, so you are comparing two different object.

As per documentation :

true if the given object represents a String equivalent to this string, false otherwise

Now, come back to equals method implementation in String class.

// some more code
if (anObject instanceof String) {
  // code here
  // some more code
 }
 return false;

You could see, it is checking if object, which you passed is type of String ?? In your case, No, it is Character. So, you are getting false as a result.