Will not closing a stringwriter cause a leak?

Question

I realize that in java the GC will eventually cleanup objects, but I'm asking if it is bad practice to not close your string writer, currently I am doing this:

 private static String processTemplate(final Template template, final Map root) {         StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();         try {             template.process(root, writer);         } catch (TemplateException e) {             logger.error(e.getMessage());         } catch (IOException e) {             logger.error(e.getMessage());         }         finally {          }          return writer.toString();     } 

Should I be closing the writer and creating a new String like this:

String result = "";  ...  finally {   result = writer.toString();   writer.close(); } 

Is this better to do?

Answer 1

The javadoc is quite explicit:

Closing a StringWriter has no effect.

And a quick look at the code confirms it:

public void close() throws IOException { } 

Answer 2

It's not holding any non-memory resource. It will be garbage collected like anything else. The close() probabaly merely exists because other writer objects do hold resources that need to be cleaned up, and the close() is needed to satify the interface.