Why do we usually use || over |? What is the difference?

Question

If you use the || and && forms, rather than the | and & forms of these operators, Java will not bother to evaluate the right-hand operand alone.

It's a matter of if you want to short-circuit the evaluation or not -- most of the time you want to.

A good way to illustrate the benefits of short-circuiting would be to consider the following example.

Boolean b = true;
if(b || foo.timeConsumingCall())
{
   //we entered without calling timeConsumingCall()
}

Another benefit, as Jeremy and Peter mentioned, for short-circuiting is the null reference check:

if(string != null && string.isEmpty())
{
    //we check for string being null before calling isEmpty()
}

more info

| does not do short-circuit evaluation in boolean expressions. || will stop evaluating if the first operand is true, but | won't.

In addition, | can be used to perform the bitwise-OR operation on byte/short/int/long values. || cannot.

So just to build on the other answers with an example, short-circuiting is crucial in the following defensive checks:

if (foo == null || foo.isClosed()) {
    return;
}

if (bar != null && bar.isBlue()) {
    foo.doSomething();
}

Using | and & instead could result in a NullPointerException being thrown here.

Logical || and && check the right hand side only if necessary. The | and & check both the sides everytime.

For example:

int i = 12;
if (i == 10 & i < 9) // It will check if i == 10 and if i < 9
...

Rewrite it:

int i = 12;
if (i == 10 && i < 9) // It will check if i == 10 and stop checking afterward because i != 10
...

Another example:

int i = 12;
if (i == 12 | i > 10) // It will check if i == 12 and it will check if i > 10
...

Rewrite it:

int i = 12;
if (i == 12 || i > 10) // It will check if i == 12, it does, so it stops checking and executes what is in the if statement
...