As others have said,
new String[0]
will indeed create an empty array. However, there’s one nice thing about arrays – their size can’t change, so you can always use the same empty array reference. So in your code, you can use:
private static final String[] EMPTY_ARRAY = new String[0];
and then just return EMPTY_ARRAY each time you need it – there’s no need to create a new object each time.