How do I find the number of instances of a Class? getClasses()???????

[Oxymoron]

Hi.
say you have made 3 instances of a person from class Person, p1, p2 & p3.
Is there a way of returning through a println, to show how many instances of a class exist???
I've tried a few ways of calling the getClasses method from Class Class, but havn't succeeded. If anyone knows i'd be extremely grateful!
thankyou all
JoE we are all of us living in the gutter.
But some of us are looking at the stars.

 

[scrat]

Hi JoE,

One solution would be to maintan a static count of your class. Static variables exists only once per class, irrespective of the number of instances of that class. The idea is to increment the count each time a class is created and decrement the count at finalization.

class Person {

private static int count = 0;

public Person() {
count++;
}

protected void finalize() {
count--;
super.finalize();
}

public getCount() {
return count;
}
}

HTH
scrat