Difference between Bitwsie and Logical Operator in Java - & vs &&, | vs ||

Java beginners often ask same type of questions, and of them is what is difference between & and && operator in Java or difference between | and || operators? Standard answer of this question is well, main difference between & and && is that former is a bitwise operator and && is a logical operator in Java. That's academic, until you clearly explains difference in working of & and && or | and ||. For absolute beginners, & is used to represent AND logic operation in Java and | is used to represent OR logic operation. If we use only one & or | then it's known as “bitwise AND” and bitwise OR operators and if we use double && or || then it's known as logical or short-circuit AND and OR operators. From name, you can guess bitwise operates at bit level and perform AND logical operation to each bit, while logical operators operate on boolean variables only. Main difference lies in there short circuit behavior, which means if there are two or more conditions, which are joined using && or || operator then not all conditions are tested as soon as you have enough data to determine result. For example in case of AND operation involving multiple condition, rest are not checked as soon as one of them becomes false, because result will always be false. Similarly in case of OR short circuit operator ||, remaining conditions are not executed if one of them is true, because as soon as one operand becomes true, result of operation will be true, regardless of result of remaining condition. This short circuit nature is another reason, why logical operators are also known as short-circuit operator. In order to solve programming problems e.g. how to count number of set bits or 1s on Integer,  good understanding of bitwise operator is required.I think, we have enough theory, let's see some real examples.

How to do static import in Eclipse - Java

Do you know what is shortcut of doing static import in Eclipse? Well I didn't know before, but today I come to know that shortcut Ctrl+Shift+M (Source > Add Import) can not only be used to add missing imports but It can also help with static import in Java program.  Suppose you are using lots of static variable from a utility class e.g. TimeUnit by referring them with class name, just like we refer static variable. In Eclipse IDE, you can select the whole reference variable and press Ctrl+Shift+M and it will automatically import that static element using static import in Java.
For example, if you have following code in your class, you can select TimeUnit.SECONDS and then use shortcut Ctrl+Shift+M to statically import SECONDS variable in your program, as shown in first and second screenshot.

3 Examples of Parsing HTML File in Java using Jsoup

HTML is core of web, all the page you see in internet are HTML, whether they are dynamically generated by JavaScript, JSP, PHP, ASP or any other web technology. Your browser actually parse HTML and render it for you. But what would you do,  if you need to parse an HTML document and find some elements,  tags, attributes or check if a particular element exists or not from Java program. If you have been in Java programming for some years, I am sure you have done some XML parsing work using parsers like DOM and SAX, but there is also good chance that you have not done any HTML parsing work. Ironically, there are few instances when you need to parse HTML document from core Java application, which doesn't include Servlet and other Java web technologies. To make the matter worse, there is no HTTP or HTML library in core JDK as well; or at least I am not aware of that. That's why when it comes to parse a HTML file, many Java programmers had to look at Google to find out how to get value of an HTML tag in Java. When I needed that I was sure that there would be an open source library which will does it for me, but didn't know that it was as wonderful and feature rich as JSoup. It not only provides support to read and parse HTML document but also allows you to extract any element form HTML file, their attribute, their CSS class in JQuery style and also allows you to modify them. You can probably do anything with HTML document using Jsoup. In this article, we will parse and HTML file and find out value of title and heading tags. We will also see example of downloading and parsing HTML from file as well as any URL or internet by parsing Google's home page in Java.

2 Examples to Convert Byte[] array to String in Java

Converting a byte array to String seems easy but what is difficult is, doing it correctly. Many programmers make mistake of ignoring character encoding whenever bytes are converted into a String or char or vice versa. As a programmer, we all know that computer's only understand binary data i.e. 0 and 1. All things we see and use e.g. images, text files, movies, or any other multi-media is stored in form of bytes, but what is more important is process of encoding or decoding bytes to character. Data conversion is an important topic on any programming interview, and because of trickiness of character encoding, this questions is one of the most popular String Interview question on Java Interviews. While reading a String from input source e.g. XML files, HTTP request, network port, or database, you must pay attention on which character encoding (e.g. UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO 8859-1) they are encoded. If you will not use the same character encoding while converting bytes to String, you would end up with a corrupt String which may contain totally incorrect values. You might have seen ?, square brackets after converting byte[] to String, those are because of values your current character encoding is not supporting, and just showing some garbage values.

How to Send Email from Java Program with Example

Sending Email from Java program is a common requirement. It doesn't matter whether you are working on core Java application, web application or enterprise Java EE application, you may need to send email to alert support personal with errors, or just send email to users on registration, password reset or asking them to confirm their email after registration. There are many such scenarios, where you need ability to send emails from Java program. In mature applications, you already have a module or library dealing with all king of email functionality and issues e.g. ability to send attachments, images, including signatures and other rich text formatting on emails, but if you have to code something from scratch then Java's Mail API is perfect place. In this article, we will learn how to send emails from Java application using mail API ( javax.mail ) . Before writing code, you must know some email basics e.g. you need a SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server. If you are running your Java application in Linux, then you should know that SMTP daemon by default listen on port 25. You can use any mail server to send emails from Java, including public email servers like GMail, Yahoo or any other provider, all you need is their SMTP server details e.g. hostname, port, connection parameters etc. You can also use SSL, TLS to securely connect and send emails, but in this example we have kept it simple and just focusing on minimum logic to send mail from Java application. In further articles, we will learn how to send mail using attachments, how to send HTML formatted email, how to attach images in emails, how to use SSL authentication to connect GMail Server and send emails etc. For now, let's understand this simple example of Java Mail API.

Binary Search vs Contains Performance in Java List

There are two ways to search an element in a List class, by using contains() method or by using Collections.binarySearch() method. There are two versions of binarySearch() method, one which takes a List and Comparator and other which takes a List and Comparable. This method searches the specified list for the specified object using the binary search algorithm. The list must be sorted into ascending order according to the natural ordering of its elements (as by the sort(List) method) prior to making this call. If List is not sorted, then results are undefined. If the List contains multiple elements equal to the specified object, there is no guarantee which one will be returned. This method runs in log(n) time for a "random access" list (which provides near-constant-time positional access). If the specified list does not implement the RandomAccess interface and is large, this method will do an iterator-based binary search that performs O(n) link traversals and O(log n) element comparisons. In the end this method returns the index of the search key, if it is contained in the list; otherwise, (-(insertion point) - 1). The insertion point is defined as the point at which the key would be inserted into the list: the index of the first element greater than the key, or list.size() if all elements in the list are less than the specified key. This means that return value will be >= 0 if and only if the key is found. Since common implementation of List interface e.g. ArrayList, Vector, CopyOnWriteArrayList and Stack implements RandomAccess interface, they can be used for performing binary search, but there are other implementations like LinkedList, which doesn't implement java.util.RandomAccess, hence not suitable for binary search operation. Since binary search can only be performed in sorted list, you also need to sort your collection before doing search, which may potentially impact performance, especially if your List is big and not in sorted order already.

How to Format and Display Number to Currency in Java - Example Tutorial

Displaying financial amount in respective currency is common requirement in Java based E-commerce applications. For example if you are selling products on-line globally, you will show price of product in their local currency rather than USD or some other currency. Storing price in every currency is not a good option because of maintenance, and more realistically fluctuation in exchange rates. That's why many of these application prefer stores price of books, electronic goods or whatever product they are selling in USD, and responsibility of converting that price to local currency and displaying is left to client side code. If your client is Java based client e.g. Swing GUI , Java FX client, or a JSP web page, you can use java.text.NumberFormat class to format currency in Java. NumberFormat class allows you to display price in multiple currency depending upon Locale supported by your Java version. All you need to do is to get correct Currency Instance based upon Locale, for example to display amount in US dollar, call NumberFormat.getCurrencyInstance() method with Locale as Locale.US, similarly to display currency as UK pound sterling, pass Locale.UK and for displaying money in Japanese Yen, pass Locale.JAPAN. Once you get the correct instance of currency formatter, all you need to do is call their format() method by passing your number. We will see an example of converting one currency to other and displaying amount in multiple currency in Java. It's actually very much similar to formatting date in Java, so if you are familiar to that part, it would be easy to format currency as well.