Question

Maybe I’m really confused because it seems a very simple question but Google and the official documentation were not enough.

I want to copy an BigInteger, and I can’t find a clean way of doing it. BigInteger a = b when b is a BigInteger, as BigInteger is an object and there’s no operator overloading here, a references to the same object as b

The cleanest way I’ve found so far is BigInteger a = b.add(BigInteger.ZERO), but still a dirty way for me.

Answer 1

BigInteger is immutable like other wrapper classes such as Integer and String. So no worries about possible alteration/tampering.

P.S: As a bonus, here’s a link on when defensive copying is needed.

http://www.javapractices.com/topic/TopicAction.do?Id=15