Given a Class<?> that describes class A, is it somehow possible to get the Class<?> that matches the class A[]?
Class<?> clazz = A.class;
Class<?> arrayclazz = clazz.toArray(); // ??
assert arrayclazz.equals(A[].class);
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2 Answers
answered Feb 23, 2011 at 13:16
Michael Borgwardt
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5 Comments
Idan K
Thats a neat trick. But is there anyway to save the new instance?
Tom Hawtin - tackline
@Idan K You could hack the strings, but the overhead of creating a zero-length array is tiny. Probably less than that of creating intermediate
Strings and StringBuilders and then parsing that and looking up the classes. Of course, best would be to avoid reflection and indeed reference arrays altogether.Idan K
@Tom: that makes sense. I'm just a little surprised there isn't anything in Java to do this directly without resorting to these kind of tricks.
Tom Hawtin - tackline
@Idan K It's not like such a thing should get used much!
Idan K
@Tim: agreed. The only reason I had to resort to this trickery is because of this ideone.com/OChQB The first call to
getGenericReturnType returned int[] but the second returned GenericArrayType and I was only able to get the component from it, i.e. int.