Why do Strings start with a "" in Java?

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Why does “abcd”.StartsWith(“”) return true?

Whilst debugging through some code I found a particular piece of my validation was using the .startsWith() method on the String class to check if a String started with a blank character

Considering the following :

public static void main(String args[])
{

    String s = "Hello";
    if (s.startsWith(""))
    {
        System.out.println("It does");
    }

}

It prints out It does

My question is, why do Strings start off with a blank character? I'm presuming that under the hood Strings are essentially character arrays, but in this case I would have thought the first character would be H

Can anyone explain please?

8 Answers
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