Java. getClass() returns a class, how come I can get a string too?
System.out.println(someobj)
is always equivalent to:
System.out.println(String.valueOf(someobj));
And, for non-null values of someobj
, that prints someobj.toString();
In your case, you are doing println(obj.getClass())
so you are really doing:
System.out.println(String.valueOf(obj.getClass()));
which is calling the toString
method on the class.
All objects in Java inherit from the class Object. If you look at that document, you'll see that Object
specifies a toString
method which converts the object into a String. Since all non-primitive types (including Class
es) are Object
s, anything can be converted into a string using its toString
method.
Classes can override this method to provide their own way of being turned into a string. For example, the String
class overrides Object.toString
to return itself. Class
overrides it to return the name of the class. This lets you specify how you want your object to be output.