In the Spring Boot application I want to read a resources that happens to be RSAPublicKey.
Within the @SpringBootTestthat should simulate the app running I get the following behaviour:

    @Value("classpath:./keys/public.pem")
    RSAPublicKey[] key;

    @Value("classpath:./keys/*.pem")
    String[] pubRess;

    @Value("classpath:./keys/*.pem")
    Resource[] ress;

    @Value("classpath:./keys/*.pem")
    List<Resource> ressList;

resolves to:

I’ll address last two declarations which I find inconsistent the most:

When loaded using Resources[], the array length is 2 which is correct as in ./keys/ path there are really two .pem files.

When loading the same SpEl into the List<> I get one resource element that is even incorrect:

class path resource [keys/*.pem]

when I would load the resources into the RSAPublicKey[] array, with @Value("classpath:./keys/*.pem") it would fail saying:

Caused by: java.io.UncheckedIOException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: class path resource [keys/*.pem] cannot be opened because it does not exist

so it was unable to resolve that * in this case. Without the wildcard I can load one into the array as shown in the picture.

I find this pretty counter-intuitive. Is this behaviour intender or is it a bug?

I’m using: Java API level 11 on Azul 11.0.23 and Spring Boot 2.7.18 (can’t upgrade now)