Write a StringBuilder to a Writer, without toString()

Question

In a Servlet, I am building a very large amount of HTML content in a StringBuilder that, at the end, needs to be written to the response's PrintWriter. In order to use a PrintWriter, it must first call StringBuilder's toString() method to get the content as a String. But this unnecessarily duplicates the content. Is there some way to directly write from the StringBuilder since it already is holding the content?

PrintWriter can accept a CharSequence, but the documentation states it calls the CharSequence's toString(), so it doesn't really help.

The only clear way I can see is to use StringBuilder's charAt(i) method to get and write one character at a time, but would this be an improvement?

Answer 1

As an alternative, you could drop the StringBuilder and use a StringWriter and a PrintWriter.

Answer 2

You could just write to the PrintWriter in the first place rather than to the StringBuilder...

Using charAt would definitely not help you. It would yield very poor performance to do it this way. If you really want to proceed in that direction you could use the StringBuilder.subString(start,end) method. This method will allow you to read for example 1000 characters at a time and print it to the PrintWriter...