Question

I’ve seen an example of it before, but I’ve never really found any good reference material dealing with it. I know it’s possible to pass in several parameters, ints for example, by defining the method as

public void aMethod(int...a)   

But I don’t know any more about it than that. I’ve seen an example, and it returned the average of the ints passed.
Is this an out-dated way of passing parameters? Is it even acceptable to use this? What exactly is the syntax like when doing this? (Some reference material would be great)

Answer 1

It’s called varargs (from the C syntax). See Sun’s varargs guide for an overview and this JDC Tech Tip for usage. It is not out-dated; it was put in as a feature request since previously you were forced to create an array or list, which was really ugly for supporting something like C’s printf.

public void myMethod(String... args) {     for (String aString:args) {         System.out.println(aString);     } }