JPasswordField value and string are not equal, but they appear the same

Question

I know people have asked this question before, but they didn't use .equals(). So I am going to ask again, why is that I have two strings, but when I compare them with .equals() I get false. The two strings are 1234 (passwordField2.getPassword() and String s = bufferedreader.readLine().) I have used s.toCharArray to compare them, and same thing. I tried printing them both out and I got 1234 1234

Does anyone know why this is happening? Thank you!

Answer 1

Looking at the JavaDocs, passwordField2.getPassword() returns a char[].

The following code should work for you:

boolean passwordsMatch = bufferedreader.readLine().equals(
    new String(passwordField2.getPassword())
);

This code works as it converts the char[] to a String that can then be compared to the original String value.

Edit: As Alex L. states in his answer, JPasswordField stores passwords as character arrays for security purposes.

As such, a better way to write this code may be:

boolean passwordsMatch = Arrays.equals(
    passwordField2.getPassword(), 
    bufferedreader.readLine().toCharArray()
);