Hey there! I'm setting public fields of the Object 'this' via reflection. Both the field name and the value are given as String. I use several various field types: Boolean, Integer, Float, Double, an own enum, and a String. It works with all of them except with a String. The exception that gets thrown is that no method with the Signature String.valueOf(String) exists... Now I use a dirty instanceof workaround to detect if each field is a String and in that case just copy the value to the field. private void setField(String field, String value) throws Exception { Field wField = this.getClass().getField(field); if(wField.get(this) instanceof String){ //TODO dirrrrty hack //stupid workaround as java.lang.String.valueOf(java.lang.String) fails... wField.set(this, value); }else{ Method parseMethod = wField.getType().getMethod("valueOf", new Class[]{String.class}); wField.set(this, parseMethod.invoke(wField, value)); } } Any ideas how to avoid that workaround? Do you think java.lang.String should support the method valueOf(String)? thanks, fabb