How to format internal Java names?

Question

I'm parsing a report that returns Java method signatures as something like:

method(Ljava/lang/String;[Ljava/lang/String;ZI)V

What's the best way to convert this back into something that's more human-readable? For example, the above should be something like:

void method(String, String, boolean, int)

Answer 1

Here are a couple of examples of code that does this:

• http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/api/edu/umd/cs/findbugs/ba/SignatureConverter.html
• http://attrib4j.sourceforge.net/apidocs/attrib4j/bcel/DescriptorUtil.html

If all else fails, you copy the code from one or other of these places.

A couple of things to note:

• You cannot recover meaningful variable names for a signature (obviously ...)
• If the methods are generic, this is not indicated in the signature. The signature information is for the raw (erased) method type.