Explanation of “ClassCastException” in Java

Question

I read some articles written on \"ClassCastException\", but I couldn\'t get a good idea on that. Is there a good article or what would be a brief explanation?

Answer 1

A Java ClassCastException is an Exception that can occur when you try to improperly convert a class from one type to another.

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;

public class ClassCastExceptionExample {

  public ClassCastExceptionExample() {

    List list = new ArrayList();
    list.add("one");
    list.add("two");
    Iterator it = list.iterator();
    while (it.hasNext()) {
        // intentionally throw a ClassCastException by trying to cast a String to an
        // Integer (technically this is casting an Object to an Integer, where the Object 
        // is really a reference to a String:
        Integer i = (Integer)it.next();
    }
  }
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  new ClassCastExceptionExample();
 }
}

If you try to run this Java program you’ll see that it will throw the following ClassCastException:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.String
at ClassCastExceptionExample  (ClassCastExceptionExample.java:15)
at ClassCastExceptionExample.main  (ClassCastExceptionExample.java:19)

The reason an exception is thrown here is that when I’m creating my list object, the object I store in the list is the String “one,” but then later when I try to get this object out I intentionally make a mistake by trying to cast it to an Integer. Because a String cannot be directly cast to an Integer — an Integer is not a type of String — a ClassCastException is thrown.