Question

I instantly apologize if this question is incredibly easy to answer, but I’ve never dealt with Java before, and I don’t even know how to phrase this question properly. Let’s assume the following piece of code (in Java):

byte[] arrayOfBytes1;
int i = 16;
arrayOfBytes1 = new byte[i];

byte[] arrayOfBytes2 = arrayOfBytes1;

So my question is, what would arrayOfBytes2 actually be? Is it going to be an independent copy of arrayOfBytes1, or it’s going to reference it? Thanks in advance.

P.S. Oh, and if someone can provide C/C++ analogue it would be incredibly helpful.

Answer 1

It’s going to be a reference to it, so you’ll save yourself a lot of confusion by doing the following instead:

byte[] arrayOfBytes2 = arrayOfBytes1.clone();

That way you’ll get an independent copy of the initial array.