Easy way to get a test file into JUnit

Question

Can somebody suggest an easy way to get a reference to a file as a String/InputStream/File/etc type object in a junit test class? Obviously I could paste the file (xml in t

Answer 1

I know you said you didn't want to read the file in by hand, but this is pretty easy

public class FooTest
{
    private BufferedReader in = null;

    @Before
    public void setup()
        throws IOException
    {
        in = new BufferedReader(
            new InputStreamReader(getClass().getResourceAsStream("/data.txt")));
    }

    @After
    public void teardown()
        throws IOException
    {
        if (in != null)
        {
            in.close();
        }

        in = null;
    }

    @Test
    public void testFoo()
        throws IOException
    {
        String line = in.readLine();

        assertThat(line, notNullValue());
    }
}

All you have to do is ensure the file in question is in the classpath. If you're using Maven, just put the file in src/test/resources and Maven will include it in the classpath when running your tests. If you need to do this sort of thing a lot, you could put the code that opens the file in a superclass and have your tests inherit from that.