The time complexity for a code segment

Question

From an online notes, I read the following java code snippet for reversing a string, which is claimed to have quadratic time complexity. It seems to me that the “for” loop for i just iterates the whole length of s. How does it cause a quadratic time complexity?

public static String reverse(String s)
{
  String rev = new String();
  for (int i = (s.length()-1); i>=0; i--) {
      rev = rev.append(s.charAt(i));
  }
  return rev.toString();
}

Answer 1

public static String reverse(String s)
{
  String rev = " ";
  for (int i=s.length()-1; i>=0; i--)
  rev.append(s.charAt(i); // <--------- This is O(n)
  Return rev.toString();
}

I copy pasted your code. I'm not sure where you get this but actually String doesn't have append method. Maybe rev is a StringBuilder or another Appendable.

Answer 2

Possibly because the append call does not execute in constant time. If it's linear with the length of the string, that would explain it.