What is this: [Ljava.lang.Object;?

Question

I get this when I call toString on an object I received from a function call. I know the type of the object is encoded in this string, but I don't know how to read it.

What is this type of encoding called?

Answer 1

[Ljava.lang.Object; is the name for Object[].class , the java.lang.Class representing the class of array of Object .

The naming scheme is documented in Class.getName() :

If this class object represents a reference type that is not an array type then the binary name of the class is returned, as specified by the Java Language Specification ( §13.1 ).

If this class object represents a primitive type or void , then the name returned is the Java language keyword corresponding to the primitive type or void .

If this class object represents a class of arrays, then the internal form of the name consists of the name of the element type preceded by one or more '[' characters representing the depth of the array nesting. The encoding of element type names is as follows:

 Element Type Encoding boolean Z byte B char C double D float F int I long J short S class or interface Lclassname;

Yours is the last on that list. Here are some examples:

// xxxxx varies
System.out.println(new int[0][0][7]); // [[[I@xxxxx
System.out.println(new String[4][2]); // [[Ljava.lang.String;@xxxxx
System.out.println(new boolean[256]); // [Z@xxxxx

The reason why the toString() method on arrays returns String in this format is because arrays do not @Override the method inherited from Object , which is specified as follows:

The toString method for class Object returns a string consisting of the name of the class of which the object is an instance, the at-sign character `@', and the unsigned hexadecimal representation of the hash code of the object. In other words, this method returns a string equal to the value of:

 getClass().getName() + '@' + Integer.toHexString(hashCode())

Note : you can not rely on the toString() of any arbitrary object to follow the above specification, since they can (and usually do) @Override it to return something else. The more reliable way of inspecting the type of an arbitrary object is to invoke getClass() on it (a final method inherited from Object ) and then reflecting on the returned Class object. Ideally, though, the API should've been designed such that reflection is not necessary (see Effective Java 2nd Edition, Item 53: Prefer interfaces to reflection ).

---

On a more "useful" toString for arrays

java.util.Arrays provides toString overloads for primitive arrays and Object[] . There is also deepToString that you may want to use for nested arrays.

Here are some examples:

int[] nums = { 1, 2, 3 };

System.out.println(nums);
// [I@xxxxx

System.out.println(Arrays.toString(nums));
// [1, 2, 3]

int[][] table = {
        { 1, },
        { 2, 3, },
        { 4, 5, 6, },
};

System.out.println(Arrays.toString(table));
// [[I@xxxxx, [I@yyyyy, [I@zzzzz]

System.out.println(Arrays.deepToString(table));
// [[1], [2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]

There are also Arrays.equals and Arrays.deepEquals that perform array equality comparison by their elements, among many other array-related utility methods.

Related questions

• Java Arrays.equals() returns false for two dimensional arrays. -- in-depth coverage

Answer 2

If you are here because of the Liquibase error saying:

Caused By: Precondition Error
...
Can't detect type of array [Ljava.lang.Short

and you are using

not {
  indexExists()
}

precondition multiple times, then you are facing an old bug: https://liquibase.jira.com/browse/CORE-1342

We can try to execute an above check using bare sqlCheck (Postgres):

SELECT COUNT(i.relname)
FROM
    pg_class t,
    pg_class i,
    pg_index ix
WHERE
    t.oid = ix.indrelid
    and i.oid = ix.indexrelid
    and t.relkind = 'r'
    and t.relname = 'tableName'
    and i.relname = 'indexName';

where tableName - is an index table name and indexName - is an index name