The toString() method is useful for debugging. By default, when an object is printed out in a print stream like System.out, the toString() method of the object is automatically called.
While develping the code the developers used to check the object properties are getting through the object or not. For this print statement will be useful to quick test in the console.
public String toString() Returns: a string representation of the object.Let us take a Person class and try to print the person object using the System.out.println() statement.
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| package blog.javabynataraj;//@author Muralidhar Nclass Person{ public String fname; public String lname; Person(String fn,String ln){ this.fname=fn; this.lname=ln; } public String getFname() { return fname; } public void setFname(String fname) { this.fname = fname; } public String getLname() { return lname; } public void setLname(String lname) { this.lname = lname; }}public class ToStringTest { public static void main(String[] args) { Person p = new Person("murali","dhar"); System.out.println(p); }} |
The output will be the class name@hexadecimal
here the Object class's method toString returning
getClass().getName()+'@'+Integer.toHexString(hashCode())But here we assumed that the firstname and the lastname will be print. But it is not done. This is the magic toStirng method.
But in the below program we can print the firstname and lastname of person Object. What we are going to do here is just overriding the toString method in Person Class.
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| package blog.javabynataraj;//@author Muralidhar Nclass Person{ public String fname; public String lname; Person(String fn,String ln){ this.fname=fn; this.lname=ln; } public String getFname() { return fname; } public void setFname(String fname) { this.fname = fname; } public String getLname() { return lname; } public void setLname(String lname) { this.lname = lname; } public String toString(){ return (getClass()+" FirstName: "+fname+" LastName: "+lname); }}public class ToStringTest { public static void main(String[] args) { Person p = new Person("murali","dhar"); System.out.println(p); }} |
