What is literals in Java?

A literal is a source code representation of a fixed value. They are represented directly in the code without any computation.

Literals can be assigned to any primitive type variable.
Literals in Java are a sequence of characters (digits, letters, and other characters) that represent constant values to be stored in variables. For example: byte a = 68;
char a = 'A'

byte, int, long, and short can be expressed in decimal(base 10), hexadecimal(base 16) or octal(base 8) number systems as well.


Prefix 0 is used to indicates octal and prefix 0x indicates hexadecimal when using these number systems for literals.
For example:

int decimal = 100; int octal = 0144; int hexa = 0x64;

String literals in Java are specified like they are in most other languages by enclosing a sequence of characters between a pair of double quotes.
Examples of string literals are:
"Hello World" "two\nlines"
"\"This is in quotes\""
String and char types of literals can contain any Unicode characters. For example: char a = '\u0001';
String a = "\u0001";

Java language supports few special escape sequences for String and char literals as well.

They are:

Notation                                Character represented