Question

Is there any built-in Java6 method (perhaps in lang or reflection?) for performing:

private Class[] getTypes(final Object[] objects) {
    final Class[] types = new Class[objects.length];
    for (int i = 0; i < objects.length; i++) {
        types[i] = objects[i].getClass();
    }
    return types;
}

Which takes an Object array and returns an array containing the type of each element?

Answer 1

No, there’s no built-in facility for this in JavaSE.

Not much of a burden, surely, it’s easily unit-testable and only a few lines.

If you really wanted something you don’t write yourself, there are various 3rd-party libraries that will do it for you (e.g. Apache Commons Lang’s ClassUtils, CGLIB’s ReflectUtils), so if you already have one of those, you can use them.