What are the limits of BigDecimal and BigInteger?

java limit biginteger bigdecimal numberformatexception
Daanish picture Daanish · Jul 30, 2013 · Viewed 8.2k times · Source

I was multiplying very two huge BigIntegervalues in a program. It failed. What are the limits of BigInteger and BigDecimal ?

Answer

Peter Lawrey picture Peter Lawrey · Jul 30, 2013

You won't get NumberFormatException multiplying large numbers. If the number produced is too large, you will get a cryptic NegativeArraySizeException as the size of the array overflows.

You are more likely to get an out of memory error.

The limit is 32 * 2^32-1 bits for BigInteger or about 2^(4 billion).

You can get a NumberFormatException if you

  • create a BigInteger from an empty byte[]
  • use a signum < -1 or > +1
  • try to parse a number in base >36 or < 2
  • have a string with illegal digits.

When you get an exception you should also look at the message and the stack trace as this usually gives you the real cause.

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