Question

I’ve read in a book:

..characters are just 16-bit unsigned integers under the hood. That means you can assign a number literal, assuming it will fit into the unsigned 16-bit range (65535 or less).

It gives me the impression that I can assign integers to characters as long as it’s within the 16-bit range.

But how come I can do this:

char c = (char) 80000; //80000 is beyond 65535.

I’m aware the cast did the magic. But what exactly happened behind the scenes?

Answer 1

Looks like it’s using the int value mod 65536. The following code:

int i = 97 + 65536;
char c = (char)i;
System.out.println(c);
System.out.println(i % 65536);
char d = 'a';
int n = (int)d;
System.out.println(n);

Prints out ‘a’ and then ’97’ twice (a is char 97 in ascii).