Safely casting long to int in Java

Question

What's the most idiomatic way in Java to verify that a cast from long to int did not lose any information?

This is my current implementation:

public static int safeLongToInt(long l) {
    int i = (int)l;
    if ((long)i != l) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException(l + " cannot be cast to int without changing its value.");
    }
    return i;
}

Answer 1

I think I'd do it as simply as:

public static int safeLongToInt(long l) {
    if (l < Integer.MIN_VALUE || l > Integer.MAX_VALUE) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException
            (l + " cannot be cast to int without changing its value.")
    }
    return (int) l;
}

I think that expresses the intent more clearly than the repeated casting... but it's somewhat subjective.

Note of potential interest - in C# it would just be:

return checked ((int) l);

Answer 2

Java integer types are represented as signed. With an input between 2³¹ and 2³² (or -2³¹ and -2³²) the cast would succeed but your test would fail.

What to check for is whether all of the high bits of the long are all the same:

public static final long LONG_HIGH_BITS = 0xFFFFFFFF80000000L;
public static int safeLongToInt(long l) {
    if ((l & LONG_HIGH_BITS) == 0 || (l & LONG_HIGH_BITS) == LONG_HIGH_BITS) {
        return (int) l;
    } else {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("...");
    }
}

Answer 3

I claim that the obvious way to see whether casting a value changed the value would be to cast and check the result. I would, however, remove the unnecessary cast when comparing. I'm also not too keen on one letter variable names (exception x and y, but not when they mean row and column (sometimes respectively)).

public static int intValue(long value) {
    int valueInt = (int)value;
    if (valueInt != value) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException(
            "The long value "+value+" is not within range of the int type"
        );
    }
    return valueInt;
}

However, really I would want to avoid this conversion if at all possible. Obviously sometimes it's not possible, but in those cases IllegalArgumentException is almost certainly the wrong exception to be throwing as far as client code is concerned.