char primitive default value

[anand phulwani]

Here I have two problems,
1)When the JVM is implicitly initialising the default value of the char primitive a,b,c ,after that its printing its Unicode value as -1, why so ?,
Shouldn't It print 0.

2)my second problem is when i initialize c=' '; the Unicode Value of b and c both is -1 ,when printed ,but when a test for equality is cheked between b and c its returning false.

public class Test
{
static char a;
static char b;
static char c;
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("a's Unicode Value= "+Character.getNumericValue(a));
c=' ';
System.out.println("b's Unicode Value= "+Character.getNumericValue(b));
System.out.println("c's Unicode Value= "+Character.getNumericValue(c));

if (b==c)
System.out.println("Congrats!!,b equals to c");
else
System.out.println("Sorry!,b is not equal to c");
}  
}

Results into the output

a's Unicode Value= -1
b's Unicode Value= -1
c's Unicode Value= -1
Sorry!,b is not equal to c

Thanks,
With Regds,
Anand

[Sandeep Chhabra]

Anand This might help you

getNumericValue
public static int getNumericValue(char ch)Returns the int value that the specified Unicode character represents. For example, the character '\u216C' (the roman numeral fifty) will return an int with a value of 50.
The letters A-Z in their uppercase ('\u0041' through '\u005A'), lowercase ('\u0061' through '\u007A'), and full width variant ('\uFF21' through '\uFF3A' and '\uFF41' through '\uFF5A') forms have numeric values from 10 through 35. This is independent of the Unicode specification, which does not assign numeric values to these char values.

If the character does not have a numeric value, then -1 is returned. If the character has a numeric value that cannot be represented as a nonnegative integer (for example, a fractional value), then -2 is returned.

Note: This method cannot handle supplementary characters. To support all Unicode characters, including supplementary characters, use the getNumericValue(int) method.


Parameters:
ch - the character to be converted.
Returns:
the numeric value of the character, as a nonnegative int value; -2 if the character has a numeric value that is not a nonnegative integer; -1 if the character has no numeric value.

Sandy

[Sandeep Chhabra]

And for your second question

B wil never be equal to C; since you have assigned a space to c
c=' ';
having the unicode value of 32;
whereas b contains its default value ie. '\u0000' or the unicode value 0

hence 32==0 will return false.

Hope this helps

Sandy
[ September 19, 2005: Message edited by: Sandeep Chhabra ]

[Vlado Zajac]

To print unicode value of some character (like 65 for 'A' or 32 for space), convert it to int.

System.our.println("a's Unicode Value = " + (int)a);