Printing an object

[Oceana Wickramasinghe]

hey guys, my question is,what is it that you get when you include an object refernece variable inside System.out.println. we usually get something like "ClassName@1a46e30" .what does this really mean? what is the significance of that value?

[Momo Sawada]

i think its the location of the object... if i'm not mistaken... i once tried to display an array without iterating through it and its what i got...or something like that..

[Rob Spoor]

Check out the source code of java.lang.Object, inside the src.zip file you can find in your JDK folder.

But since I'm such a nice guy I looked it up for you. This is the current implementation of Object.toString():

    public String toString() {
	return getClass().getName() + "@" + Integer.toHexString(hashCode());
    }

So not exactly the location (as that's not available in Java), but the hash code. By default that is something probably based on the memory location but it can of course be overridden.