Question

What is the use of public final String[] getStringArray(String key) in ResourceBundle?
Aren’t keys in properties files unique? Would this ever return more than one value? If not why does it return an array?

Answer 1

If you read carefully the documentation of ResourceBundle, its says that: –

Resource bundles belong to families whose members share a common base
name, but whose names also have additional components that identify
their locales.

Also: –

Resource bundles contain key/value pairs. The keys uniquely identify a
locale-specific object in the bundle.

So, keys are only unique for a particular locale. In two different locale, you can have keys that are same. That is why the return type is String[].

And for the method – getStringArray: –

Gets a string array for the given key from this resource bundle or one
of its parents.