Immutability of Strings in Java

Question

Consider the following example.

String str = new String();

str  = "Hello";
System.out.println(str);  //Prints Hello

str = "Help!";
System.out.println(str);  //Prints Help!

Now, in Java, String objects are immutable. Then how come the object str can be assigned value "Help!". Isn't this contradicting the immutability of strings in Java? Can anybody please explain me the exact concept of immutability?

Edit:

Ok. I am now getting it, but just one follow-up question. What about the following code:

String str = "Mississippi"; 
System.out.println(str); // prints Mississippi 

str = str.replace("i", "!"); 
System.out.println(str); // prints M!ss!ss!pp! 

Does this mean that two objects are created again ("Mississippi" and "M!ss!ss!pp!") and the reference str points to a different object after replace() method?

Answer 1

str is not an object, it's a reference to an object. "Hello" and "Help!" are two distinct String objects. Thus, str points to a string. You can change what it points to, but not that which it points at.

Take this code, for example:

String s1 = "Hello";
String s2 = s1;
// s1 and s2 now point at the same string - "Hello"

Now, there is nothing¹ we could do to s1 that would affect the value of s2. They refer to the same object - the string "Hello" - but that object is immutable and thus cannot be altered.

If we do something like this:

s1 = "Help!";
System.out.println(s2); // still prints "Hello"

Here we see the difference between mutating an object, and changing a reference. s2 still points to the same object as we initially set s1 to point to. Setting s1 to "Help!" only changes the reference, while the String object it originally referred to remains unchanged.

If strings were mutable, we could do something like this:

String s1 = "Hello";
String s2 = s1;
s1.setCharAt(1, 'a'); // Fictional method that sets character at a given pos in string
System.out.println(s2); // Prints "Hallo"

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Edit to respond to OP's edit:

If you look at the source code for String.replace(char,char) (also available in src.zip in your JDK installation directory -- a pro tip is to look there whenever you wonder how something really works) you can see that what it does is the following:

• If there is one or more occurrences of oldChar in the current string, make a copy of the current string where all occurrences of oldChar are replaced with newChar.
• If the oldChar is not present in the current string, return the current string.

So yes, "Mississippi".replace('i', '!') creates a new String object. Again, the following holds:

String s1 = "Mississippi";
String s2 = s1;
s1 = s1.replace('i', '!');
System.out.println(s1); // Prints "M!ss!ss!pp!"
System.out.println(s2); // Prints "Mississippi"
System.out.println(s1 == s2); // Prints "false" as s1 and s2 are two different objects

Your homework for now is to see what the above code does if you change s1 = s1.replace('i', '!'); to s1 = s1.replace('Q', '!'); :)

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¹ Actually, it is possible to mutate strings (and other immutable objects). It requires reflection and is very, very dangerous and should never ever be used unless you're actually interested in destroying the program.