How do I get environment variables?

Environment variables are a set of dynamic values that can affect a running process, such as our Java program. Each process usually have their own copy of these variables.

Now we would like to obtain the available variables in our environment or operating system, how do I do this in Java? Here is a code example of it.

package org.kodejava.lang;

import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Set;

public class SystemEnv {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // We get the environment information from the System class. 
        // The getenv method (why shouldn't it called getEnv()?) 
        // returns a map that will never have null keys or values 
        // returned.
        Map<String, String> map = System.getenv();

        Set<String> keys = map.keySet();
        for (String key : keys) {
            // Here we iterate based on the keys inside the map, and
            // with the key in hand we can get it values.
            String value = map.get(key);
            System.out.println(key + " = " + value);
        }
    }
}

Here are some results on my machine.

...
M2 = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\maven\apache-maven-3.5.0\bin
JETTY_HOME = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\jetty\tools\jetty-distribution-9.4.31.v20200723
USERNAME = wsaryada
ProgramFiles(x86) = C:\Program Files (x86)
M2_REPO = C:\Users\wsaryada\.m2
SPRING_HOME = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\spring-boot-cli\spring-2.2.4.RELEASE
M2_HOME = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\maven\apache-maven-3.5.0
JAVA_HOME = C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_161
OS = Windows_NT
COMPUTERNAME = KRAKATAU
CATALINA_HOME = C:\tools\apache-tomcat-10.0.11
...

How do I copy some items of an array into another array?

In the code snippet below we are going to learn how to use the System.arraycopy() method to copy array values. This method will copy array from the specified source array, starting from the element specified by starting position. The array values will be copied to the target array, placed at the specified start position in the target array and will copy values for the specified number of elements.

The code snippet below will copy 3 elements from the letters array and place it in the results array. The copy start from the third elements which is the letter U and will be place at the beginning of the target array.

package org.kodejava.lang;

public class ArrayCopy {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Creates letters array with 5 chars inside it.
        String[] letters = {"A", "I", "U", "E", "O"};

        // Create an array to where we are going to copy
        // some elements of the previous array.
        String[] results = new String[3];

        // Copy 3 characters from letters starting from the
        // third element and put it inside result array
        // beginning at the first element
        System.arraycopy(letters, 2, results, 0, 3);

        // Just print out what were got copied, it will
        // contains U, E, and O
        for (String result : results) {
            System.out.println("result = " + result);
        }
    }
}

The output of the code snippet:

result = U
result = E
result = O

How do I terminate a Java application?

In an application we sometimes want to terminate the execution of our application, for instance because it cannot find the required resource.

To terminate it we can use exit(status) method in java.lang.System class or in the java.lang.Runtime class. When terminating an application we need to provide a status code, a non-zero status assigned for any abnormal termination.

package org.kodejava.lang;

import java.io.File;

public class AppTerminate {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        File file = new File("config.xml");

        int errCode = 0;
        if (!file.exists()) {
            errCode = 1;
        }

        // When the error code is not zero go terminate
        if (errCode > 0) {
            System.exit(errCode);
        }
    }
}

The call to System.exit(status) is equals to Runtime.getRuntime().exit(status). Actually the System class will delegate the termination process to the Runtime class.

Running the code give the following output because it can’t find the config.xml file.

Process finished with exit code 1

How do I check if a string is a valid number?

When building a computer program we will use a lot of string to represent our data. The data might not just information about our customer name, email or address, but will also contain numeric data represented as string. So how do we know if this string contains a valid number?

Java provides some wrappers to the primitive data types that can be used to do the checking. These wrappers come with the parseXXX() method such as Integer.parseInt(), Float.parseFloat() and Double.parseDouble() methods.

package org.kodejava.lang;

public class NumericParsingExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String age = "15";
        String height = "160.5";
        String weight = "55.9";

        try {
            int theAge = Integer.parseInt(age);
            float theHeight = Float.parseFloat(height);
            double theWeight = Double.parseDouble(weight);

            System.out.println("Age    = " + theAge);
            System.out.println("Height = " + theHeight);
            System.out.println("Weight = " + theWeight);
        } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

In the example code we use Integer.parseInt(), Float.parseFloat(), Double.parseDouble() methods to check the validity of our numeric data. If the string is not a valid number java.lang.NumberFormatException will be thrown.

The result of our example:

Age    = 15
Height = 160.5
Weight = 55.9

How do I get the minimum and maximum value of a primitive data types?

To get the minimum or maximum value of a primitive data types such as byte, short, int, long, float and double we can use the wrapper class provided for each of them, the wrapper classes are Byte, Short, Integer, Long, Float and Double which is located in java.lang package.

package org.kodejava.lang;

public class MinMaxExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Byte.MIN    = " + Byte.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Byte.MAX    = " + Byte.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Short.MIN   = " + Short.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Short.MAX   = " + Short.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Integer.MIN = " + Integer.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Integer.MAX = " + Integer.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Long.MIN    = " + Long.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Long.MAX    = " + Long.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Float.MIN   = " + Float.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Float.MAX   = " + Float.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Double.MIN  = " + Double.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Double.MAX  = " + Double.MAX_VALUE);
    }
}

The result of the code above shows the minimum and maximum value for each data types.

Byte.MIN    = -128
Byte.MAX    = 127
Short.MIN   = -32768
Short.MAX   = 32767
Integer.MIN = -2147483648
Integer.MAX = 2147483647
Long.MIN    = -9223372036854775808
Long.MAX    = 9223372036854775807
Float.MIN   = 1.4E-45
Float.MAX   = 3.4028235E38
Double.MIN  = 4.9E-324
Double.MAX  = 1.7976931348623157E308