How does instanceof work exactly? When I have a hierarchy of objects that extend and implement eachother, does being instance of something work through these both lines?

For example I want to know if my object is instance of Listor ArrayList or Collection?

I examined this tree, http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/package-tree.html

And they seem to fall all under Object ofcourse, but what I need, I think is AbstractCollection or even normal Collection , because that seems to be the highest in hierarchy.

Will I be fine, when I check an object against only Collection to cover all those 3 classes?

java instanceof
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