Question

Class.forName(boolean.class.getName());

This doesn’t work in Java – the virtual machine slaps you with a ClassNotFoundException. I was in need for something like that because I wanted to reflect methods based on Strings that included the method signatures, like

public void doSomething(boolean yesWeCan, java.lang.String[] presidents);

At the end I came up with a custom ‘ClassFactory’ which translates the type Strings to class objects. This factory includes a lot of handlers for primitive and array type values.

The handler for array type objects is something like:

if (isArrayOfObjects) {
   return Class.forName("L["+typeName.replace("[]", "")+";");
}

My question is – have I missed something in the Java 1.5+ API that might do the trick?

Edit

Thanks for your answers, it’s not a surprise that Class.forName works pretty well with the wrapper classes. But I’m looking for a solution for all java types, including arrays and primitives. Thus my first line is not a typo. Some method signatures do have java primitives as parameters, I can’t just use a wrapper class to reflect the method in a library, I really need the Class object for that type (like boolean).

Class<boolean> booleanClassObject = boolean.class;

works fine, as well as

String name = boolean.class.getName();

Answer 1

Perhaps you have a number of ifs:

if (type.equals("boolean")) {
    return boolean.class;
} else if (type.equals("int")) {
    return int.class;
} .. etc