Java Float equals() method example

java.lang.Float equals(Object obj)

Description

Based from the official documentation of Oracle, the equals method of Float class compares this Float object against the specified object method Argument. The result is true if and only if the argument is not null and is a Float object that represents a float with the same value as the float represented by this object. We can say that two float values are considered to be the same if and only if the method floatToIntBits(float) returns the identical int value when applied to both the values.

Important Notes:

overrides equals in class Object

Method Syntax

public boolean equals(Object obj)

Method Returns

The equals(Object obj) method of Float class returns true if the objects are the same; false otherwise.

Compatibility

Java 1.0

Discussion

Normally in dealing with primitive type float we test equality by using == operators. This will no longer true if we are dealing with Float wrapper class because inherently to test two object equality we have to use the equals which is by default being inherited by all java objects from class Object.

		Float f1 = 3.12f;
		Float f2 = 3.12f;
		System.out.println(f1==f2);

Normally if the above code declaration uses float primitive type, the result would be true however since the float value 3.12f is assigned to wrapper class Float, it would print out false. If we wanted to use the == operator instead of equals, then we need to convert the Float values using the floatValue() method of Float class.

		f1.floatValue() == f2.floatValue()

The above code snippet would result to true.

Java Float equals(Object obj) Example

Below is a simple java example on the usage of equals(Object obj) method of Float class.

package com.javatutorialhq.java.examples;

import java.util.Scanner;

import static java.lang.System.*;

/*
 * This example source code demonstrates the use of 
 * equals(Object obj) method of Float class.
 */

public class FloatEqualsExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		// Ask user input for first number
		System.out.print("Enter First Number:");
		// declare the scanner object
		Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
		// use scanner to get value from user console
		Float f1 = scan.nextFloat();
		// Ask user input for second number
		System.out.print("Enter Second Number:");
		Float f2 = scan.nextFloat();
		// close the scanner object
		scan.close();

		if (f1.equals(f2)) {
			out.println("numbers entered are numerically equal");

		} else {
			out.println("numbers entered are NOT numerically equal");
		}

	}

}

Basically on the above example, we just ask for two values from user using the console. We then use Scanner class to assign the values entered to Float objects. These two object were tested for equality using the equals method of Float class. As a result of the test, we then printed out corresponding message to the console.

Sample Output

Below is the sample output when we try to run the above java example code.

References

Oracle Java Documentation