Example - 1

In the example below, two Java String objects are declared and initialized with the same string values. An if statement is used to determine if the strings are equivalent.

System.out.println("str1 == str2");String str1 = new String("Hello");String str2 = new String("Hello");if (str1 == str2) {}

However, the if statement will not be executed as the strings are compared using the "==" operator. For Java objects, such as String objects, the "==" operator compares object references, not object values. While the two String objects above contain the same string values, they refer to different object references, so the System.out.println statement will not be executed. To compare object values, the previous code could be modified to use the equals method:

System.out.println("str1 equals str2");if (str1.equals(str2)) {}