change default locale for junit test

Question

How do you change the default locale for a JUnit Test. Current locale is en. I want to test for es_ES. I tried:

System.setProperty("locale", "es_ES");

But this doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

You can set the default Locale with Locale.setDefault.

Sets the default locale for this instance of the Java Virtual Machine. This does not affect the host locale.

Locale.setDefault(new Locale("es", "ES"));

Testing with the following resource files:

• test.properties

  message=Yes
  

• test_es_ES.properties

  message=Sí
  

Here is my main function, with no change to my default locale (en_US):

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    ResourceBundle test = ResourceBundle.getBundle("test");
    System.out.println(test.getString("message"));
}

Output:

Yes

Here is my main function, with a change to your test locale (es_ES):

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    Locale.setDefault(new Locale("es", "ES"));
    ResourceBundle test = ResourceBundle.getBundle("test");
    System.out.println(test.getString("message"));
}

Output:

Sí

This should work when applied to a JUnit test case.