File reading & writing utilities
A very common programming task is to read a file into memory, modify it, and then write it out again. One of the problems with the Java I/O library is that it requires you to write quite a bit of code in order to perform these common operations—there are no basic helper function to do them for you. What’s worse, the decorators make it rather hard to remember how to open files. Thus, it makes sense to add helper classes to your library that will easily perform these basic tasks for you. Here’s one that contains static methods to read and write text files as a single string. In addition, you can create a TextFile class that holds the lines of the file in an ArrayList (so you have all the ArrayList functionality available while manipulating the file contents):
//: com:bruceeckel:util:TextFile.java
// Static functions for reading and writing text files as
// a single string, and treating a file as an ArrayList.
// {Clean: test.txt test2.txt}
package com.bruceeckel.util;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class TextFile extends ArrayList {
// Tools to read and write files as single strings:
public static String
read(String fileName) throws IOException {
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
BufferedReader in =
new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
String s;
while((s = in.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(s);
sb.append("\n");
}
in.close();
return sb.toString();
}
public static void
write(String fileName, String text) throws IOException {
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(
new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(fileName)));
out.print(text);
out.close();
}
public TextFile(String fileName) throws IOException {
super(Arrays.asList(read(fileName).split("\n")));
}
public void write(String fileName) throws IOException {
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(
new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(fileName)));
for(int i = 0; i < size(); i++)
out.println(get(i));
out.close();
}
// Simple test:
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
String file = read("TextFile.java");
write("test.txt", file);
TextFile text = new TextFile("test.txt");
text.write("test2.txt");
}
} ///:~
All methods simply pass IOExceptions out to the caller. read( ) appends each line to a StringBuffer (for efficiency) followed by a newline, because that is stripped out during reading. Then it returns a String containing the whole file. Write( ) opens and writes the text to the file. Both methods remember to close( ) the file when they are done.
The constructor uses the read( ) method to turn the file into a String, then uses String.split( ) to divide the result into lines along newline boundaries (if you use this class a lot, you may want to rewrite this constructor to improve efficiency). Alas, there is no corresponding “join” method, so the non-static write( ) method must write the lines out by hand.
In main( ), a basic test is performed to ensure that the methods work. Although this is a small amount of code, using it can save a lot of time and make your life easier, as you’ll see in some of the examples later in this chapter.
