Integer value comparison

Question

I'm a newbie Java coder and I just read a variable of an integer class can be described three different ways in the API. I have the following code:

if (count.compareTo(0)) { 
            System.out.println(out_table);
            count++;
    }

This is inside a loop and just outputs out_table.
My goal is to figure out how to see if the value in integer count > 0.

I realize the count.compare(0) is the correct way? or is it count.equals(0)?

I know the count == 0 is incorrect. Is this right? Is there a value comparison operator where its just count=0?

Answer 1

To figure out if an Integer is greater than 0, you can:

• check if compareTo(O) returns a positive number:

  if (count.compareTo(0) > 0)
       ...
  

  But that looks pretty silly, doesn't it? Better just...

• use autoboxing¹:

  if (count > 0)
      ....
  

  This is equivalent to:

  if (count.intValue() > 0)
      ...
  

  It is important to note that "==" is evaluated like this, with the Integer operand unboxed rather than the int operand boxed. Otherwise, count == 0 would return false when count was initialized as new Integer(0) (because "==" tests for reference equality).

¹Technically, the first example uses autoboxing (before Java 1.5 you couldn't pass an int to compareTo) and the second example uses unboxing. The combined feature is often simply called "autoboxing" for short, which is often then extended into calling both types of conversions "autoboxing". I apologize for my lax usage of terminology.