When looking through Java documentation or answers for Stack Overflow / programming forum questions, I often see people referring to methods like String#format, Object#clone etc, rather than String.format.
Is this something to do with it being a non-static method, or is this just some convention?
This is quite hard to search for due to most search engines ignoring the '#' symbol so I apologise if this is a duplicate question.
The usage of String#format comes from the javadocs and is seen there as {@link package.class#member label} (docs on javadoc).
The generated link to the javadoc for String#format is <a href="../../java/lang/String.html#format(java.lang.String, java.lang.Object...)">format</a> - the # being a link to an anchor within the page - in this case, the String.html page and the #format(java.lang.String,%20java.lang.Object...) anchor. You can see an example of this at Oracle java docs for String#format (note the url and poke around the generated html too)
Nothing more than the leaking of the documentation format out into... other documentation.
