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Assignment Operators

You use the basic assignment operator, =, to assign one value to another. The MaxVariablesDemo program uses = to initialize all its local variables:

//integers
byte largestByte = Byte.MAX_VALUE;
short largestShort = Short.MAX_VALUE;
int largestInteger = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
long largestLong = Long.MAX_VALUE;

//real numbers
float largestFloat = Float.MAX_VALUE;
double largestDouble = Double.MAX_VALUE;

//other primitive types
char aChar = 'S';
boolean aBoolean = true;

The Java programming language also provides several shortcut assignment operators that allow you to perform an arithmetic, shift, or bitwise operation and an assignment operation all with one operator. Suppose that you wanted to add a number to a variable and assign the result back into the variable, like this:

i = i + 2;

You can shorten this statement using the shortcut operator +=, like this:

i += 2;

The two previous lines of code are equivalent.

The following table lists the shortcut assignment operators and their lengthy equivalents.

Shortcut Assignment Operators

Operator	Use	Equivalent to
+=	op1 += op2	op1 = op1 + op2
-=	op1 -= op2	op1 = op1 - op2
*=	op1 *= op2	op1 = op1 * op2
/=	op1 /= op2	op1 = op1 / op2
%=	op1 %= op2	op1 = op1 % op2
&=	op1 &= op2	op1 = op1 & op2
|=	op1 |= op2	op1 = op1 | op2
^=	op1 ^= op2	op1 = op1 ^ op2
<<=	op1 <<= op2	op1 = op1 << op2
>>=	op1 >>= op2	op1 = op1 >> op2
>>>=	op1 >>>= op2	op1 = op1 >>> op2

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