What is the difference between boxing and unboxing in java

If the conversion goes the other way, this is called unboxing. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 5 years, 11 months ago. Active 3 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 4k times. Improve this question. Tunaki Well, not necessarily. However that's just irrelevant semantics. Autoboxing is automatic boxing, right? You can box an int manually using Integer. Increment is not mainly known as decrement, either. Show 3 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. It involves two steps. First take out the value from ArrayList and store it in a wrapper object.

Second, unbox the wrapper object into a primitive data type. Auto-Boxing is a feature added to Java 5. It converts a primitive type to wrapper type automatically. There is no need to use the new operator to perform Boxing.

See the below difference between Boxing and Auto-Boxing. Auto-UnBoxing converts a wrapper type into a primitive type automatically. There is no need to use a method to do UnBoxing. Compare the below set of code with the one that we learned in the Boxing and UnBoxing section. If a method accepts an argument of wrapper type, it is valid to pass to it either a data of primitive type or a data of a reference type. It is shown in the below program.

Also, if a method accepts an argument of primitive type, it is valid to pass to it either a data of primitive type or a data of a reference type.

If a method declares its return type to be of wrapper type, then, it is valid to return values of either primitive type or wrapper type. Boxing Unboxing It convert value type into an object type. It convert an object type into value type. Boxing is an implicit conversion process. Unboxing is the explicit conversion process. Here, the value stored on the stack copied to the object stored on the heap memory.

Here, the object stored on the heap memory copied to the value stored on the stack. Next C Boxing And Unboxing. Recommended Articles. Article Contributed By :.