Getting class in Kotlin

In this recipe, we will look into the ways by which we can get the class reference in Kotlin. Primarily, we will be working with reflection. Reflection is a library that provides the ability to inspect code at runtime instead of compile time. In Java, we can get a variable's class through getClass(), like something.getClass(). Let’s see how to resolve a variable’s class in Kotlin.

How to do it...

1. Java’s equivalent of resolving a variable's name is with the .getClass() method, for example, something.getClass(). In Kotlin, we can achieve the same thing with something.javaClass.
2. To get a reference to the reflection class, we used to do something.class in Java, whose Kotlin equivalent is something::class. This returns a KClass. The special features of this KClass is that it provides introspection capabilities quite similar to the abilities provided to Java’s reflection class. Note that the KClass is different from Java’s Class object. If you want to obtain a Java Class object...