Java file handling tutorial

One of the most frequently used tasks in programming is writing to and reading from a file. To do this in Java there are more possibilities. At this time only the most frequently used text file handling solutions will be presented.

To write anything to a file, first of all, we need a file name we want to use. The file name is a simple string like this:

String fileName = "test.txt";

If you want to write in a file which is located elsewhere you need to define the complete file name and path in your fileName variable:

String fileName = "c:\\\\filedemo\\\\test.txt";

However, if you define a path in your file name then you have to take care of the path separator. On a windows system, the '\\' is used and you need to backslash it so you need to write '\\\\', in Unix, Linux systems the separator is a simple slash '/'.

To make your code OS independent you can get the separator character as follows:

String separator = File.separator;

To open a file for writing use the FileWriter class and create an instance from it. The file name is passed in the constructor like this:

FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(fileName);

This code opens the file in overwrite mode. If you want to append to the file then you need to use another constructor like this:

FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(fileName,true);

Besides this, the constructor can throw an IOException so we put all of the code inside a try-catch block. 

At this point, we have a writer object and we can send real content to the file. You can do this using the write() method, which has more variant but the most commonly used requires a string as an input parameter.
 
Calling the write() method doesn't mean that it immediately writes the data into the file. The output is maybe cached so if you want to send your data immediately to the file you need to call the flush() method.
 
Last step, you should close the file with the close() method and you are done.

The basic write method looks like this:

public void writeFile() {
    String fileName = "c:\\\\test.txt";

    try {
        FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(fileName,true);
        writer.write("Test text.");
        writer.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

However, in a real-world situation the FileWriter usually not used directly. Instead of FileWriter the BufferedWriter or from Java 1.5 the PrintWriter is used. These writer objects gives you more flexibility to handle your IO. Here is a simple BufferedWriter example:

public void writeFile() {
	String fileName = "c:\\\\test.txt";

	try {
		BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(fileName,true));
		writer.write("Test text.");
		writer.newLine();
		writer.write("Line2");
		writer.close();
	} catch (IOException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
}

If everything is alright, you have successfully written some basic text into a file. Now it's time to read the file content back. Not surprisingly reading from a file is very similar to writing. We only need to use *Reader objects instead of *Writer objects. It means that you can use FileReader or BufferedReader. As a simple FileReader can handle only a single character or a character array it is more convenient to use the BufferedReader which can read a complete line from a file as a string. So using a BufferedReader we can read a text file line by line with the readln() method as you can see in this example:

public String readFile() {
	String fileName = "c:\\\\test.txt";
	String LS = System.getProperty("line.separator");
	StringBuffer fileContent = new StringBuffer();

	try {
		FileReader fr = new FileReader(fileName);
		BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));

		String line;
		while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
			fileContent.append(line).append(LS);
		}
	} catch (IOException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}

	return fileContent.toString();
}

I hope this article made a beginner java programmer life easier. Finally, let's see how the complete Java program looks like:

public class FileDemo {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		FileDemo fd = new FileDemo();
		fd.writeFile();
		String txt = fd.readFile();
		System.out.println(txt);
	}

	public void writeFile() {
		String fileName = "c:\\\\test.txt";

		try {
			BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(fileName,true));
			writer.write("Test text.");
			writer.newLine();
			writer.write("Line2");
			writer.close();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

	public String readFile() {
		String fileName = "c:\\\\test.txt";
		String LS = System.getProperty("line.separator");
		StringBuffer fileContent = new StringBuffer();

		try {
			FileReader fr = new FileReader(fileName);
			BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));

			String line;
			while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
				fileContent.append(line).append(LS);
			}
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}

		return fileContent.toString();
	}
}