Java Long Class Tutorial and Example

The Long class is simply a wrapper class for the primitive type long. It wraps the long primitive value to an object. An object of type Long contains a single field whose type is long. 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 Long class which is very useful.In addition, this class provides several methods for converting a long to a String and a String to a long, as well as other constants and methods useful when dealing with a long.

public final class Long
extends Number
implements Comparable<Long>

Long Class is available since JDK 1.0

The Long class as part of the java.lang package is one of the classes of the java api not only being one of the oldest class but also one that is being widely used. Let’s tackle the basics of using the Long class. To begin with, let’s tackle first how to instantiate a Long object

Long value = new Long(12L);

Since we are dealing with long, the suffix L or l is required. This is a common mistake for most of the newbie java programmer.

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

Long value = 12l;

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 two constructor available to Long class which we can use to instantiate a Character object:

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

		long val1= 12L;
		long val2 = 13L;
		if(val1==val2){
			System.out.println("They are equal");
		}
		else{
			System.out.println("Values are not equal");
		}

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

		Long val1 = 12L;
		Longr val2 = new Long(12L);
		if(val1.equals(val2)){
			System.out.println("They are equal");
		}
		else{
			System.out.println("They are not equal");			
		}