variadic functions - When do you use varargs in Java?

Question

I'm afraid of varargs. I don't know what to use them for.

Plus, it feels dangerous to let people pass as many arguments as they want.

What's an example of a context that would be a good place to use them?

Answer 1

Varargs are useful for any method that needs to deal with an indeterminate number of objects. One good example is String.format. The format string can accept any number of parameters, so you need a mechanism to pass in any number of objects.

String.format("This is an integer: %d", myInt);
String.format("This is an integer: %d and a string: %s", myInt, myString);