程序员的小窝

How can I use JUnit4 idiomatically to test that some code throws an exception?

While I can certainly do something like this:

@Test
public void testFooThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
  boolean thrown = false;

  try {
    foo.doStuff();
  } catch (IndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
    thrown = true;
  }

  assertTrue(thrown);
}

I recall that there is an annotation or an Assert.xyz or something that is far less kludgy and far more in-the-spirit of JUnit for these sorts of situations.

It depends on the JUnit version and what assert libraries you use.

• For JUnit5 and 4.13 see answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/2935935/2986984
• If you use assertJ or google-truth, see answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/41019785/2986984

The original answer for JUnit <= 4.12 was:

@Test(expected = IndexOutOfBoundsException.class)
public void testIndexOutOfBoundsException() {

    ArrayList emptyList = new ArrayList();
    Object o = emptyList.get(0);

}

Though answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/31826781/2986984 has more options for JUnit <= 4.12.

Reference :

• JUnit Test-FAQ

Edit: Now that JUnit 5 and JUnit 4.13 have been released, the best option would be to use Assertions.assertThrows() (for JUnit 5) and Assert.assertThrows() (for JUnit 4.13+). See my other answer for details.

If you haven't migrated to JUnit 5, but can use JUnit 4.7, you can use the ExpectedException Rule:

public class FooTest {
  @Rule
  public final ExpectedException exception = ExpectedException.none();

  @Test
  public void doStuffThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
    Foo foo = new Foo();

    exception.expect(IndexOutOfBoundsException.class);
    foo.doStuff();
  }
}

This is much better than @Test(expected=IndexOutOfBoundsException.class) because the test will fail if IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown before foo.doStuff()

See this article for details.