No love from core-libs-dev? It's backwards-incompatible, but in a way that would unbreak existing broken code. Might be a worthwhile cleanup. Jeremy On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Eddie Aftandilian <eaftan@google.com> wrote:
Hi all,
We recently realized that calling new StringBuilder(char) does not do what you would think it does. Since there is no char constructor defined, the char is widened to an int and the StringBuffer is presized to the character's encoded value. Thus code like this prints an empty string rather than the expected "a": System.out.println(new StringBuilder('a'));
Would it be possible to add a char constructor to StringBuilder to prevent this problem? I understand this would change the behavior of any code that is currently doing this, but it's hard to imagine anyone doing this intentionally. Of the ~20 instances we found in Google's codebase, all were bugs. What is your policy on making changes like this where (a) it will cause a change in behavior, but (b) the currently behavior is clearly wrong?
If you're willing to take the change, I'd be happy to send a patch.
Thanks, Eddie