Length limit for a variable name in Java [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Max name length of variable or method in Java

I was reading the java docs and it says “A variable's name can be any legal identifier — an unlimited-length sequence of Unicode letters and digits … “ in c++ the variable name length is around 255 characters depending on the compiler, so how is this handled in java does the compiler truncate the variable name after x number of characters, and if this is true what would be x ?

Answer 1

According to the class file format spec (under section 4.11):

The length of field and method names, field and method descriptors, and other constant string values is limited to 65535 characters by the 16-bit unsigned length item of the CONSTANT_Utf8_info structure (§4.4.7). Note that the limit is on the number of bytes in the encoding and not on the number of encoded characters. UTF-8 encodes some characters using two or three bytes. Thus, strings incorporating multibyte characters are further constrained.

This applies to local variables as well because of the LocalVariableTable pointing to CONSTANT_Utf8_info values for the variable names.