Class.newInstance() does not work the same way in Java 5.0

Question

We upgraded our development environment to RAD 7, and I am experiencing an interesting problem with the code below which worked perfectly with the previous version.
Class cloneClass = fromObject.getClass();
Object toObject = null;
toObject = cloneClass.newInstance();
I am using an open source hashtable called OrderedHashtable that uses the key-value lookup capabilities of a hashtable and order preserving capablities of a vector. It stores the objects in a hashtable and stores the keys in a vector.
fromObject in the code above is a key (String) that I retrieve from the OrderedHashtable and clone it using the code above. But with java 1.5 , the cloneClass.newInstance of this String object returns an empty string.
I guess there is a work around where I can check if the cloneClass is an Instance of String and just do fromObject.toString(), but I was curious to know if there was a change in the way class.newInstance() works in Java 1.5

Answer 1

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fromObject in the code above is a key (String) that I retrieve from the OrderedHashtable and clone it using the code above.No. How could that code possibly clone a String? Where are you telling it what the new String's contents should be?
(HINT: Nowhere.)
I guess there is a work around where I can check if the cloneClass is an Instance of String and just do fromObject.toString(), but I was curious to know if there was a change in the way class.newInstance() works in Java 1.5No, it has not changed.