Public Object: Quine Programs in Java

Quine Programs in Java

Michael Kölling blogged about Quines - programs that print themselves. Here's my best effort in Java (prettyprinted for readability):

class A {
  static {
    String a="class A{static{String a=%s%s%1$s;System.out.printf(a,'%1$s',a);}}";
    System.out.printf(a,'"',a);
  }
}

Can you beat 122 characters?

# posted by Jesse Wilson on Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Comining this with Daniel Gronau's enum technique, I can hit 112 characters!

# posted by swankjesse on April 16, 2008 7:26 PM

After doing my best effort, I'm only 4 characters off from the optimal one here. Of course I should have thought to use ant int for the quote character!

# posted by swankjesse on April 16, 2008 7:32 PM

What am I missing? Don't you need a main() method?

# posted by Eric Burke on April 17, 2008 6:56 PM

Not really. Static initializers run before main().

# posted by swankjesse on April 18, 2008 1:06 AM

Yeah...but then it blows up and prints an error message. Feels like cheating a bit.

# posted by Eric Burke on April 18, 2008 4:06 AM

Yeah, it's cheating. The workaround is to call System.exit(0) at the end.

# posted by swankjesse on April 18, 2008 9:01 AM