How to instantiate an object from another's class?

Question

Hi... first post here
I have the following problem:
I have a first object, lets call it obj1, of class X (where X could be, for example, 'Class1' or in another moment 'Class2', etc.)
Now, I have another object, obj2, which I wish to instantiate it with the same class as obj1. The problem is I don't always know which class does obj1 belongs, so programming with an if-else statement and the getClass().getName() method is not a solution, since I cannot program for all the possible cases.
I know that with obj1.getClass() I get obj1's class and that with obj1.getClass().getName() I get a String with obj1's class name.
I guess that making obj2 of class Object I can get it, but my question is:
How do I do to create the instance of obj2 so its class in that moment is the same as the class of obj1? (And by the way, how can I use a specific constructor of obj1 for obj2?)
I repeat that the if-else method won't do since the class for obj1 won't always be in a known set of classes.
Thanks for any help or tip you can give me
Javier
from Mexico

Answer 1

You would use the Class.forName() static method to get a Class object of the class you are looking for. Then you would use its newInstance() to create an instance of that class using a no-arguments constructor. If you need some other constructor (and how would you know that?) then Class has a getConstructor(...) method and a getConstructors() method that return one or more Constructor objects you could use. Follow the API documentation from there.