Technically speaking, there’s no such thing as a null array; but since arrays are objects, array types are reference types (that is: array variables just hold references to arrays), and this means that an array variable can be null
rather than actually pointing to an array:
An empty array is an array of length zero; it has no elements:
int[] emptyArray = new int[0];
(and can never have elements, because an array’s length never changes after it’s created).
When you create a non-empty array without specifying values for its elements, they default to zero-like values — 0
for an integer array, null
for an array of an object type, etc.; so, this:
int[] arrayOfThreeZeroes = new int[3];
is the same as this:
int[] arrayOfThreeZeroes = { 0, 0, 0 };
(though these values can be re-assigned afterward; the array’s length cannot change, but its elements can change).