Java Character Class Tutorial and Example

The Character class simply a wrapper class for the primitive type char. It wraps the char primitive value to an object. An object of type Character contains a single field whose type is char. So what would be the benefit if wraps around the primitive data type to an object? Well basically we would be able to access all the methods that is readily available on the Character class which is very useful. In addition, this class provides several methods for determining a character’s category (lowercase letter, digit, etc.) and for converting characters from uppercase to lowercase and vice versa. We will go over each and every method available to Byte class thoroughly.

Character information is based on the Unicode Standard, version 6.2.0.

The methods and data of class Character are defined by the information in the UnicodeData file that is part of the Unicode Character Database maintained by the Unicode Consortium. This file specifies various properties including name and general category for every defined Unicode code point or character range.

public final class Character
extends Object
implements Serializable, Comparable<Character>

Character Class is available since JDK 1.0

The Character class as part of the java.lang package is one of the classes of the java api that is being widely used. Let’s tackle the basics of using the Character class. To begin with, let’s tackle first how to instantiate a Character object

Character value = new Character('c');

Basically the declaration of a Character object is similar with the method on we assign a primitive data type. Similarly, to convert Character primitive the Byte object has only two possible values, which is either true or false. This is a straightforward method to instantiate a Character object type. Let’s take another way to do this.

Byte value = 12;

The 2nd method is using the autoboxing concept of java programming language which directly converts a primitive data type to its corresponding wrapper class.  If you would like to go more into details, I am recommending for you to read the official java documentation regarding autoboxing and unboxing.

There is only one constructor available to Character class which we can use to instantiate a Character object:

Normally when we do equality test for Character primitive data type we do like this:

		Character c1= 'c';
		char c2 = 'c';
		if(c1==c2){
			System.out.println("They are equal");
		}
		else{
			System.out.println("Values are not equal");
		}

This will no longer work in dealing with Character object type. To test equality we need to make use of equals which is a method inherited from Object class.

		Character c1 = 'c';
		Character c2 = new Character('c');
		if(c1.equals(c2)){
			System.out.println("They are equal");
		}
		else{
			System.out.println("They are not equal");			
		}