equivalent to
  StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

but I wanted to make the intent here crystal clear.

Sigh.

You should re-read my first post in this thread, then the reply from
Lionel van den Berg, and my reply to his reply, to which you have just
answered with a "Sigh".
The text, in English, before and after the code snippets, is part of
the post, and you should read it as well. The code snippet was
precisely there to explain to Lionel why he must not concatenate
Strings inside loops, since doing it results in the same bytecode as
the ugly loop above, with lots of StringBuffer and String creations.

JB.

[snip]

It might pay to redesign the above in a way where
the field width of the can be altered dynamically
via an argument passed to a function or some such:

for( int index = 0;
     index < ( fieldWidth - src.length() ); ++index ) {
     sb.append( c );
 }

A C++ std::string has an overloaded constructor
that allows you to pre allocate it with a specific
character as follows:

std::string s( '0', length );

I looked at Java' String class and StringBuilder
and unfortunately couldn't find an equivalent.

If Java has no operator overloading, how could I
create my own class to return a value?

E.g:

String s = MyString( '0', length );

Is that possible or do I have to build a method
for it and then call that?

String s = MyString( '0', length ).get();
 Or...
String s = new MyString( '0', length ).get();

Thanks,

Chris