Type Casting in Java

Type conversion or type casting simply means different ways of changing an entity of one data type into another data type. e.g. simply conversion of integer value into floating value or text.

Java supports two types of casting :

   

1.)  Primitive data type casting

2.)   Reference data type casting

Note : we will discussed Reference data type casting in next discussion.

Primitive data type casting :

Primitive data types are basic data types of any programming language we can also say that these are  building blocks of any programming language.

In Java Primitive data types are classified into eight different types :

1. Boolean Data type : which contains its value either true or false.

2    2.  Char : character data type whose values are 16 bit Unicode character

      3.  Arithmetic Data type : which also categorized into two different ways :

• Integral types :

1. Byte
2. Int 
3. Long
4. Short

• Floating–point types

1. Float
2. Double

Primitive Data type casting is divided into two parts :

1.    Implicit Type casting
2.    Explicit type casting :

Implicit Type casting : Implicit type casting is done automatically by compiler.In case of Implicit type casting Programmers do not apply any effort for it.
                  

What is implicit Type casting ?

To understand Implicit Type casting in more detail we took an example :

Suppose I am taking a variable as int and assigning its value is ‘a’ which is char value

Int x=’a’;

public class ImplicitExample {

    public static void main(String a[]){

        int x ='a';

        System.out.println(a);

    }   

}

After adding this code inside Java code editor of its execution

And after compiling this code we obtain this result 

Some Important points regarding Implicit type casting

•   Bigger Data type variable stores smaller data type value
•  Compiler is responsible for implicit type casting
•  In case of Implicit type casting we stores small value into big container and this  process is  known as widening or Upcasting.
•  In this no loss of information. 

Explicit Type Casting :

Explicit type casting is done by programmer because in this programmer wants to store bigger data type value into smaller data type variable which is practically not possible and so compiler neglect for doing this and shows compile time error but if Programmer wants to compile this program on any cost then in that case java provides facility of type casting i.e Explicit Type casting.