How to test a private constructor in Java application? [duplicate]

Answer 1

If you add an exception in the constructor such as:

private Utils() {
    throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
}

The invocation of constructor.newInstance() in the test class will throw an InvocationTargetException instead of your UnsupportedOperationException, but the desired exception will be contained in the thrown one.
If you want to assert the thrown of your exception, you could throw the target of the invocation exception, once the invocation exception has been caught.
For instance, using jUnit 4 you could do this:

@Test(expected = UnsupportedOperationException.class)
public void utilityClassTest() throws NoSuchMethodException, IllegalAccessException, InstantiationException {
    final Constructor<Utils> constructor = Utils.class.getDeclaredConstructor();
    constructor.setAccessible(true);
    try {
        constructor.newInstance();
    } catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
        throw (UnsupportedOperationException) e.getTargetException();
    }
}