get third party library versions in Java

Question

In Python, after importing libraries, you can easily get their version numbers. For example for json, you can easily get its version by using json.__version__. Is there a way in Java that can do the same thing?

Answer 1

There is a standard, but it's not commonly used. You may well be able to pull version info out of the jar's MANIFEST.MF file, but that will be particular to a library/vendor etc. Hopefully if you're only interested in a few particular libraries, then you can accommodate whatever notation they've adopted.