Iterating over the characters in a string

I was wondering what would be the fastest method to iterate over the characters in a string with Java. A small test implements the following things:

• using an Iterable
• toCharArray()
• charAt()
• calling charAt() on a CharSequence

You can download the Eclipse project as a tar or zip or browse the code online here; have a look at the StringIteratorTest class first.

Results

Without further ado here are the results:

Conclusion

If speed is what you want you shouldn’t use Iterators but one of the other solutions instead. On the other hand if you just like to play with Iterators and classes that implement Iterable you may want to choose the slower solution.