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Trail: The Reflection API
Lesson: Arrays and Enumerated Types
Arrays
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Arrays

An array is an object of reference type which contains a fixed number of components of the same type; the length of an array is immutable. Creating an instance of an array requires knowledge of the length and component type. Each component may be a primitive type (e.g. byte, int, or double), a reference type (e.g. String, Object, or java.nio.CharBuffer), or an array. Multi-dimensional arrays are really just arrays which contain components of array type.

Arrays are implemented in the Java virtual machine. The only methods on arrays are those inherited from Object. The length of an array is not part of its type; arrays have a length field which is accessible via java.lang.reflect.Array.getLength().

Reflection provides methods for accessing array types and array component types, creating new arrays, and retrieving and setting array component values. The following sections include examples of common operations on arrays:

All of these operations are supported via static methods in java.lang.reflect.Array.


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