eclipse + cucumber + selenium getting java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: gherkin.lexer.Encoding

Question

I'm a beginner to cucumber and following some example I found... seems like everything is ok just that I'm getting the following exception:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: gherkin/lexer/Encoding
at cucumber.runtime.FeatureBuilder.read(FeatureBuilder.java:154)
at cucumber.runtime.FeatureBuilder.parse(FeatureBuilder.java:115)
at cucumber.runtime.model.CucumberFeature.loadFromFeaturePath(CucumberFeature.java:93)
at cucumber.runtime.model.CucumberFeature.load(CucumberFeature.java:54)
at cucumber.runtime.model.CucumberFeature.load(CucumberFeature.java:34)
at cucumber.runtime.RuntimeOptions.cucumberFeatures(RuntimeOptions.java:151)
at cucumber.api.junit.Cucumber.<init>(Cucumber.java:63)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:57)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:526)
at org.junit.internal.builders.AnnotatedBuilder.buildRunner(AnnotatedBuilder.java:29)
at org.junit.internal.builders.AnnotatedBuilder.runnerForClass(AnnotatedBuilder.java:21)
at org.junit.runners.model.RunnerBuilder.safeRunnerForClass(RunnerBuilder.java:59)
at org.junit.internal.builders.AllDefaultPossibilitiesBuilder.runnerForClass(AllDefaultPossibilitiesBuilder.java:26)
at org.junit.runners.model.RunnerBuilder.safeRunnerForClass(RunnerBuilder.java:59)
at org.junit.internal.requests.ClassRequest.getRunner(ClassRequest.java:26)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestReference.<init>(JUnit4TestReference.java:33)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestClassReference.<init>(JUnit4TestClassReference.java:25)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestLoader.createTest(JUnit4TestLoader.java:48)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestLoader.loadTests(JUnit4TestLoader.java:38)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:452)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:683)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.run(RemoteTestRunner.java:390)
at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.main(RemoteTestRunner.java:197)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: gherkin.lexer.Encoding
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:366)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:355)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:354)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:308)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)

attaching some images of my project.

Answer 1

As mentioned here by @NareshKumar Prathipati, it is important to make sure that the versions of cucumber files match. The problem sometimes arise when manually downloading a wrong set of files.

The minimal set of files needed for using cucumber is:

• gherkin
• cucumber-jvm-deps
• cucumber-java
• cucumber-core

Which can be downloaded from here: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/info/cukes/

When downloading it manually from there, some versions appear visually higher in the list than the others (because of the way they are numbered) so many users can mistakenly download not last version. This can lead to the problem described in the question.

Answer 2

I had the similar issue, I was able to solve it by updating the latest gherkin.jar file.

Ideally, if you are using other *.jar as latest, this issue should not appear. Hope this helps.