String#repeat Coming to Java?

JDK-8197594 ("String#repeat") includes the following it its "Description": "A String method for repeating sequences of characters has been long requested with no follow through." Evidence of this interest in a method on the String class for repeating sequences of characters can be found in JDK-8197594's "Issue Links" that include JDK-8055862 ["Provide a String repeat method"] and JDK-6984084 ["(str) n times repetition of character constructor for java.lang.String"]. Both of these linked issues describe motivations for having such a method in the String class. Further evidence includes online questions such as Simple way to repeat a String in java, How to repeat string “n” times in java?, What is the simple way to repeat a string in Java?, and How do you repeat a string n number of times in Java programming?

Guava provides this desired behavior via its Strings.repeat(String, int) method and Apache Commons Lang provides this functionality via its StringUtils.repeat(String, int). It's also likely that this functionality has been implemented hundreds of times or more in individual projects. The availability of a standard java.lang.String.repeat(String, int) method could replace all of these.

The discussion on the core-libs-dev JDK mailing list regarding JDK-8197594 offers up some additional intriguing details regarding this likely addition to a future version of Java.

One interesting point is made in Jim Laskey's message in which he describes potential performance improvements that this method would provide. Specifically, Laskey writes that "performance runs with jmh ... show that these methods are significantly faster than StringBuilder equivalents" and Laskey attributes this to "fewer memory allocations," "fewer char to byte array conversions," and "faster pyramid replication vs O(N) copying." Because this is open source, the currently proposed implementation that brings these performance benefits is provided. For those who are interested, the two aforementioned open source projects have obviously made their source code available [Guava's Strings.repeat(String, int) and Apache Commons Lang's String repeat(String, int)].

Brian Goetz has posted a second reason for adding a method such as String.repeat in the standard API: to turn common functionality implemented via statements into composible expressions. Goetz explains, "My primary motivation for these sorts of methods is to take things that require execution as _statements_ (loops, if-then, etc) and turn them into _expressions_, not primarily because they are more compact, but because they are then _composible_." Goetz has described the advantages of expressions before and this is one of the primary motivations of the draft JEP related to switch expressions in Java.

A new method on java.lang.String to repeat a character sequence a specified number of times won't be as big of a deal as many other new API additions and new language features, but it can provide advantages such as not needing third-party or custom implementations, improved performance, and a standardized expression form of a commonly implemented behavior. As of this writing, JDK-8197594 is not associated with a particular Java version and is instead labeled "tbd_feature".