Thanks Nathan, that’s really helpful.
Both of them are in public classes.
javax.imageio.spi.ImageReaderWriterSpi.getFormatNames()
javax.imageio.spi.ImageWriterSpi.getImageReaderSpiNames()
That’s why I was confused. In order to prevent the array be manipulated,
shouldn’t we always clone it in public APIs? There are few other methods in
javax package returns string[] without cloning. Can I assume this is a bug
and create a JIRA/patch for it?
Thanks,
Lang
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Nathan Beyer <ndbe...@apache.org> wrote:
> What's the context of each class? Is one class public (javax.*) and
> the other an internal class (org.apache.harmony.*)?
>
> This isn't something that's unique to String arrays, nor arrays;
> returning a copy of a field is a safety measure to ensure
> immutability, thread safety and other properties that an API may want
> to guarantee. Frequently, a public API will define certain classes as
> immutable, so the cloning of arrays is necessary, as the array's
> contents could be manipulated -- an array is not immutable.
>
> -Nathan
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Yang Lang <yangl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > When I am reading through ImageIO package’s source code, I found out
> there
> > are two difference way to return a String[].
> >
> > For some methods, they call Arrays.clone() to clone a new string[] and
> > return the new one while some other methods returning the original
> String[]
> > directly.
> >
> > e.g.:
> > 1.
> > public String[] getFormatNames() {
> > return names.clone();
> > }
> >
> > 2.
> > public String[] getImageReaderSpiNames() {
> > return readerSpiNames;
> > }
> >
> > I am wondering what the difference between these two usages is. For what
> > kind of situations I need to clone a new array ?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Lang
> >
>
