Please confirm what .class does in java [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: Closed 11 years ago.

Possible Duplicate:

In Java, what does a reference to Class.class do?

Firstly apologies for asking this question here. I know it's a simple question and can probably be answered quite quickly and easily. However searching for Java .class is such a loaded search term it brings up nothing useful.

Having said that, I just start开发者_运维百科ed learning Java and I just came across something like this:

Intent i = new Intent(this, ReminderManageActivity.class);

I am not sure, but I think ReminderManageActivity.class is an attribute that gives a string of the name of the class? Is that correct?

---

I know it sounds stupid, but class is a Class object that represent the Class.

If you want to instantiate / use some class, and you want to get this class as parametr, you can't just write Intent i = new Intent(this, ReminderManageActivity); since ReminderManageActivity is not an object.

---

In Java, given an object, an instance of a class, you can get the class name by coding the following:

Class clazz = obj.getClass();
String clazzName = clazz.getName();

Sometimes you want you want to create a Class object for a given class. In this case you can do so by writing code similar to the following example:

Class clazz = MyClass.class;

source

---

If you just started learning java than you will see more about this when you will study Type Information or RTTI(Runtime Type Information)

ReminderManageActivity.class 

is called a class literal and it produces a reference to the Class object, which contains information about the class in question.
It is similar to the static method :

Class.forName("ReminderManageActivity");

---

It is an instance of java.lang.Class which is part of Java Refleciton API. You can get more informaiton about the API here

---

Because everything in Java is an object, so even classes can be represented by objects.

ReminderManageActivity.class returns a Class object representing the ReminderManageActivity class.

A Class object contains information of a class, such as class' name, class' method, class's variables etc. You can look at the class API for more information: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Class.html