By the way strings are stored in Java, assigning a string to a local variable equals to actually have a string instance with the message of our choosing somewhere in memory and the local variable contains a reference to that string instance.
String s1 = "Good";
s1 += " Morning France";
String s2 = "Good Morning";
s2 += " France";
The value returned by both local variable s1 and s2 is the same, ie "Good Morning France". However, one cannot compare their value using the equality operator (==). This is because the equality operator does not check the value of the string instance itself: it checks to see if both string variable reference the same string instance.
s1 == s2; // false
s1.equals(s2) // true
The equals method, however, does a character-by-character comparison of the two strings.
Interning a String
The intern method looks at the value of the string and check to see if there is already an interned version of that string. If it can’t find one, it provides an interned version of the string.
An interned version of a string is a canonicalized value of the string. Canonicalizing a string let use reliably use the == operator comparison between local variable pointing to the interned version of the string.
String s3 = s1.intern(); // No interned version yet so it is created here
s3 == s1 // false because s1 doesn't point to the
// interned version
String s4 = s2.intern(); // We now have an interned version, the one that
// s3 references
s3 == s4 // true
The intern method has its own overhead, therefore we only want to use it when we know we are going to compare a lot of strings. The majority of the time we will use the equals method.