How can I check if multiplying two numbers in Java will cause an overflow?

user_2959 0
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I want to handle the special case where multiplying two numbers together causes an overflow. The code looks something like this:

int a = 20;
long b = 30;

// if a or b are big enough, this result will silently overflow
long c = a * b;

That's a simplified version. In the real program a and b are sourced elsewhere at runtime. What I want to achieve is something like this:

long c;
if (a * b will overflow) {
    c = Long.MAX_VALUE;
} else {
    c = a * b;
}

How do you suggest I best code this?

Update: a and b are always non-negative in my scenario.

integer-overflow long-integer math java
15 Answers

As has been pointed out, Java 8 has Math.xxxExact methods that throw exceptions on overflow.

If you are not using Java 8 for your project, you can still "borrow" their implementations which are pretty compact.

Here are some links to these implementations in the JDK source code repository, no guarantee whether these will stay valid but in any case you should be able to download the JDK source and see how they do their magic inside the java.lang.Math class.

Math.multiplyExact(long, long) http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk11/file/1ddf9a99e4ad/src/java.base/share/classes/java/lang/Math.java#l925

Math.addExact(long, long) http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/jdk11/file/1ddf9a99e4ad/src/java.base/share/classes/java/lang/Math.java#l830

etc, etc.

UPDATED: switched out invalid links to 3rd party website to links to the Mercurial repositories of Open JDK.

user_10529790

I don't answer, but looking at the Java's code, it is simple. In JDK8, It converts into long operation, and downcast the result to int value, and compares with long result to see if value has changed. Below code explains better than me.

@HotSpotIntrinsicCandidate
public static int multiplyExact(int x, int y) {
    long r = (long)x * (long)y;
    if ((int)r != r) {
        throw new ArithmeticException("integer overflow");
    }
    return (int)r;
}
user_497670
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