When downcasting a double
value that is too large to fit in a long
, this is the expected behavior. The value that results is in fact Long.MAX_VALUE
.
To retain precision, consider converting it to a BigInteger
or BigDecimal
instead.
The JLS, Section 5.1.3, covers this "narrowing primitive conversion".
A narrowing conversion of a floating-point number to an integral type T takes two steps:
In the first step, the floating-point number is converted either to a long, if T is long, or to an int, if T is byte, short, char, or int, as follows:
If the floating-point number is NaN (§4.2.3), the result of the first step of the conversion is an int or long 0.
Otherwise, if the floating-point number is not an infinity, the floating-point value is rounded to an integer value V, rounding toward zero using IEEE 754 round-toward-zero mode (§4.2.3). Then there are two cases:
a. If T is long, and this integer value can be represented as a long, then the result of the first step is the long value V.
b. Otherwise, if this integer value can be represented as an int, then the result of the first step is the int value V.
- Otherwise, one of the following two cases must be true:
a. The value must be too small (a negative value of large magnitude or negative infinity), and the result of the first step is the smallest representable value of type int or long.
b. The value must be too large (a positive value of large magnitude or positive infinity), and the result of the first step is the largest representable value of type int or long.
(my emphasis)