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

You are trying to treat an object as an instance of a class that it is not. It's roughly analogous to trying to press the damper pedal on a guitar (pianos have damper pedals, guitars don't).

Answer 2

It is an Exception which occurs if you attempt to downcast a class, but in fact the class is not of that type.

Consider this heirarchy:

Object -> Animal -> Dog

You might have a method called:

 public void manipulate(Object o) {
     Dog d = (Dog) o;
 }

If called with this code:

 Animal a = new Animal();
 manipulate(a);

It will compile just fine, but at runtime you will get a ClassCastException because o was in fact an Animal, not a Dog.

In later versions of Java you do get a compiler warning unless you do:

 Dog d;
 if(o instanceof Dog) {
     d = (Dog) o;
 } else {
     //what you need to do if not
 }

Answer 3

It's really pretty simple: if you are trying to typecast an object of class A into an object of class B, and they aren't compatible, you get a class cast exception.

Let's think of a collection of classes.

class A {...}
class B extends A {...}
class C extends A {...}

1. You can cast any of these things to Object, because all Java classes inherit from Object.
2. You can cast either B or C to A, because they're both "kinds of" A
3. You can cast a reference to an A object to B only if the real object is a B.
4. You can't cast a B to a C even though they're both A's.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

If you want to sort objects but if class didn't implement Comparable or Comparator, then you will get ClassCastException For example

class Animal{
   int age;
   String type;

   public Animal(int age, String type){
      this.age = age;
      this.type = type;
   }
}
public class MainCls{
   public static void main(String[] args){
       Animal[] arr = {new Animal(2, "Her"), new Animal(3,"Car")};
       Arrays.sort(arr);
   }
}

Above main method will throw below runtime class cast exception

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: com.default.Animal cannot be cast to java.lang.Comparable

Answer 6

Do you understand the concept of casting? Casting is the process of type conversion, which is in Java very common because its a statically typed language. Some examples:

Cast the String "1" to an int -> no problem

Cast the String "abc" to an int -> raises a ClassCastException

Or think of a class diagram with Animal.class, Dog.class and Cat.class

Animal a = new Dog();
Dog d = (Dog) a; // No problem, the type animal can be casted to a dog, because its a dog.
Cat c = (Dog) a; // Raises class cast exception; you can't cast a dog to a cat.