Octal Literal Max Number

[Charissa Thomas]

I am ready the OCA 7 certification study book and read that you can have up to 21 digits in an octal number, not including the leading zero but when I tried to compile this line:

long maxLong = 0111111111111;

I got the following error:

Octal.java:8: error: integer number too large: 0111111111111

Please advise how I would write a 21 digit octal number or if this is incorrect, I will need to report that for the books errata notes.  Thanks for anyone's guidance!

[Ron McLeod]

If you don't suffix the value with a L or l (lower case ell) character, it is understood to be and integer, not a long, and you will be limited to the maximum value of an int.

[Charissa Thomas]

Completely forgot about that.  Thanks a bunch for your quick response!

[Roel De Nijs]

Hi Charissa Thomas,

First of all, a warm welcome to CodeRanch!

Charissa Thomas wrote:Please advise how I would write a 21 digit octal number or if this is incorrect, I will need to report that for the books errata notes.

It is definitely not an errata item. Each integer literal in Java is by default an int. If you have a literal which is outside the range of an int, you need an indicator to tell the compiler it should be handled as a long and not an int; otherwise you'll end up with a compiler error (as you have experienced). Adding the L (or l) suffix will fix this compiler error. You'll find more detailed info in this post.

And here you'll find another topic about literals with a bunch of code snippets. And if you like to know what happens if you use suffix D (or d) and F (or f) in hexadecimal literals, you should definitely read this topic and this one.

Hope it helps!
Kind regards,
Roel