function to return a string in java

Question

I wrote the following function to convert a time in milliseconds to a string of the format mins seconds  Being a former C programmer I assumed that  ans  would have to be static in order to work properly  but putting static before String appears to not be allowed    My question is - will this function work - and if not  what change will make it work   public String time to string long t     time in milliseconds       String ans      int mins secs      if  t  lt  0                return  -             else               secs    int  t 1000           mins   secs 60          secs   secs -  mins   60            ans      mins     String format   02d   secs            return ans

User · Answer

In Java  a String is a reference to heap-allocated storage  Returning  ans  only returns the reference so there is no need for stack-allocated storage  In fact  there is no way in Java to allocate objects in stack storage   I would change to this  though  You don t need  ans  at all   return String format   d  d   mins  secs

User · Answer

Your code is fine  There s no problem with returning Strings in this manner   In Java  a String is a reference to an immutable object  This  coupled with garbage collection  takes care of much of the potential complexity  you can simply pass a String around without worrying that it would disapper on you  or that someone somewhere would modify it   If you don t mind me making a couple of stylistic suggestions  I d modify the code like so   public String time to string long t     time in milliseconds       if  t  lt  0                return  -             else               int secs    int  t 1000           int mins   secs 60          secs   secs -  mins   60           return String format   d  02d   mins  secs             As you can see  I ve pushed the variable declarations as far down as I could  this is the preferred style in C   and Java   I ve also eliminated ans and have replaced the mix of string concatenation and String format   with a single call to String format

[java] function to return a string in java

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