Why is this substring problem returning false?

Question

Why is this coming out as false?

public class practice 
{
   public static void main(String [] args) 
   {
      System.out.println(startHi("hi "));
   }

   public static boolean  startHi(String str) 
   {
       System.out.println(str.substring(0,2));
       if(str.length() < 2) 
       {
          return false;
       }
       else if(str.substring(0,2) ==("hi")) 
       {
          return true;
       }
       else 
       {
         return false;
       }
   }
}

Answer 1

You should use the .equals method to check for equality of strings, not ==. See here.

Using == is checking to see if the objects have the same address in memory. That's not usually what you're looking for when checking if the value of two strings are the same.