Examining Classes

Getting the Class Name

Every class in the Java programming language has a name. When you declare a class, the name immediately follows the class keyword. In the following class declaration, the class name is Point:

public class Point {int x, y;}

At run time, you can determine the name of a Class object by invoking the getName method. The String returned by getName is the fully-qualified name of the class.

The following program gets the class name of an object. First, it retrieves the corresponding Class object, and then it invokes the getName method upon that Class object.

import java.lang.reflect.*;
import java.awt.*;

class SampleName {

   public static void main(String[] args) {
      Button b = new Button();
      printName(b);
   }

   static void printName(Object o) {
       Class c = o.getClass();
       String s = c.getName();
       System.out.println(s);
   }
}

The sample program prints the following line:

java.awt.Button

Examining Classes