btw, not sure how much you care, but in case you do find it useful knowledge...
Java has String.contains("substring") and String.equals("fullstring") along with a
whole bunch of others (like indexof/startswith/endswith/etc).
The language itself doesn't do any string parsing for comments/variables - strings are immutable; you have to concatenate every time you want to change/insert anything.
Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about how Bukkit or any plugin does stuff (e.g. whether it uses a compact SQL db or whatever), but I felt like writing it so meh.