What exactly is a .class file?

A simple way to see what String literals are used in a “. class” file is to use the javap utility in your JDK installation to dump the file using the “-v” option. Then grep for text that looks like <String “…”> where … is the String you are looking for.

The language it produces is still bytecode (not anything like Java), but it’s fairly readable and extremely instructive. Also, if you really want to, you can open up any . class file in a hex editor and read the bytecode directly . The result is identical to using javap .9 Kas 2011

A class file consists of a stream of 8-bit bytes . All 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit quantities are constructed by reading in two, four, and eight consecutive 8-bit bytes, respectively. Multibyte data items are always stored in big-endian order, where the high bytes come first.

A class file consists of a stream of 8-bit bytes . All 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit quantities are constructed by reading in two, four, and eight consecutive 8-bit bytes, respectively. Multibyte data items are always stored in big-endian order, where the high bytes come first.