Will not closing a stringwriter cause a leak?

Question

I realize that in java the GC will eventually cleanup objects, but I'm asking if it is bad practice to not close your string writer, currently I am doing this:

 private static String processTemplate(final Template template, final Map root) {
        StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
        try {
            template.process(root, writer);
        } catch (TemplateException e) {
            logger.error(e.getMessage());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            logger.error(e.getMessage());
        }
        finally {

        }

        return writer.toString();
    }

Should I be closing the writer and creating a new String like this:

String result = "";

...

finally {
  result = writer.toString();
  writer.close();
}

Is this better to do?

Answer 1

The javadoc is quite explicit:

Closing a StringWriter has no effect.

And a quick look at the code confirms it:

public void close() throws IOException {
}