How to invoke method using reflection

Question

Collections class has nested class private static class EmptyList<E> which has get(int index) method and does not have default constructor. How can I invoke get(int index) method?

Answer 1

You can create an instance of java.util.Collections$EmptyList and call its get(int) by using the code below. The code is fully tested and throws an IndexOutOfBoundsException as requested.

import java.lang.reflect.Constructor;
import java.util.List;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ReflectiveOperationException {
        Class<?> clazz = Class.forName("java.util.Collections$EmptyList");
        Constructor<?> constructor = clazz.getDeclaredConstructor();
        constructor.setAccessible(true);
        List<?> emptyList = (List<?>) constructor.newInstance();

        emptyList.get(0);
    }
}

Just because I am curious, could you probably provided more information on why you would want to do something like this?