Explanation of “ClassCastException” in Java

Question

I read some articles written on \"ClassCastException\", but I couldn\'t get a good idea on that. Is there a good article or what would be a brief explanation?

Answer 1

A class cast exception is thrown by Java when you try to cast an Object of one data type to another.

Java allows us to cast variables of one type to another as long as the casting happens between compatible data types.

For example you can cast a String as an Object and similarly an Object that contains String values can be cast to a String.

Example

Let us assume we have an HashMap that holds a number of ArrayList objects.

If we write code like this:

String obj = (String) hmp.get(key);

it would throw a class cast exception, because the value returned by the get method of the hash map would be an Array list, but we are trying to cast it to a String. This would cause the exception.