How to get amount of serialized bytes representing a Java object?

Question

What syntax would I use to get the number of bytes representing a string and compare them to the number of bytes representing an ArrayList holding that string, for

Answer 1

have a look at: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaqa/2003-12/02-qa-1226-sizeof.html

closest thing that comes to mind would be serializing it and reading the num of bytes