Java Array Comparison

Question

Working within Java, let\'s say I have two objects that, thanks to obj.getClass().isArray(), I know are both arrays. Let\'s further say that I want to compare

Answer 1

You can use the getClass() method without isArray(); check out this example:

byte[] foo = { 1, 2 };
byte[] bar = { 1, 2 };

System.out.println(foo.getClass());
System.out.println(bar.getClass());

if(foo.getClass() == bar.getClass())
    System.out.println(Arrays.equals(foo, bar));

I admit up front that this is far from a perfect solution. It shortens the potentially huge if-else chain that you had in the original post, but causes errors if the types are not the same. The following similar code wouldn't even compile in MyEclipse 8.0:

byte[] obj1 = { 1, 2 };
String[] obj2 = { "1", "2" };

System.out.println(obj1.getClass());
System.out.println(obj2.getClass());

if(obj1.getClass().toString().equals(obj2.getClass().toString()))
    System.out.println(Arrays.equals(obj1, obj2));

IF you are confident that you won't have type mismatches and your only problem is that you don't want to figure out which type you have, this could work.