What is a class literal in Java?

Question

From the Java tutorial:

Finally, there's also a special kind of literal called a class literal, formed by taking a type name and appending ".class"; for example, String.class. This refers to the object (of type Class) that represents the type itself.

To what type of variable can this literal be assigned to?

Please give a small example if possible.

Answer 1

Class<String> c = String.class; 

Check out the Javadoc for java.lang.Class to see what you can do with one of these little guys - mostly related to reflection