Java : programmatically determine all of the package names loaded on the classpath

Question

Any suggestions as to how to approach how I would find out a list of package names that exist on the current classpath?

This needs

Answer 1

If you do need to mount and scan jar files commons-vfs has this built in. That might make things a little easier if you have to go that route.

EDIT #1: You can get the classpath like so (from the example here):

String strClassPath = System.getProperty("java.class.path");
System.out.println("Classpath is " + strClassPath);

From there you can look at the local file system classes, jars, etc.

EDIT #2: Here is a solution with VFS:

import java.util.HashSet;

import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils;
import org.apache.commons.vfs.FileObject;
import org.apache.commons.vfs.FileSystemManager;
import org.apache.commons.vfs.FileType;
import org.apache.commons.vfs.VFS;

public class PackageLister {

    private static HashSet< String > packageNames = new HashSet< String >();
    private static String localFilePath;

    /**
     * @param args
     * @throws Throwable
     */
    public static void main( final String[] args ) throws Throwable {
        FileSystemManager fileSystemManager = VFS.getManager();

        String[] pathElements = System.getProperty( "java.class.path" ).split( ";" );
        for( String element : pathElements ) {
            if ( element.endsWith( "jar" ) ) {
                FileObject fileObject = fileSystemManager.resolveFile( "jar://" + element );
                addPackages( fileObject );
            }
            else {
                FileObject fileObject = fileSystemManager.resolveFile( element );
                localFilePath = fileObject.getName().getPath();

                addPackages( fileObject );
            }
        }

        for( String name : packageNames ) {
            System.out.println( name );
        }
    }

    private static void addPackages( final FileObject fileObject ) throws Throwable {
        FileObject[] children = fileObject.getChildren();
        for( FileObject child : children ) {
            if ( !child.getName().getBaseName().equals( "META-INF" ) ) {
                if ( child.getType() == FileType.FOLDER ) {
                    addPackages( child );
                }
                else if ( child.getName().getExtension().equals( "class" ) ) {
                    String parentPath = child.getParent().getName().getPath();
                    parentPath = StringUtils.remove( parentPath, localFilePath );
                    parentPath = StringUtils.removeStart( parentPath, "/" );
                    parentPath = parentPath.replaceAll( "/", "." );

                    packageNames.add( parentPath );
                }
            }
        }
    }
}