Class 14: Exceptions and File I/O

What we did

We went through basic file I/O and how we're forced to deal with exception handling to do it. The file input and output mechanisms we used in class were:

Scanner s = new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader(inFile)));
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(outFile));
	

We created a program Silly that, ultimately, read in a text file and printed the strings in that file, one per line, to another file.

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
public class Silly
{
  public static void main(String[] args) 
  {
    String inFile = args[0], outFile = args[1];

    // Get scanner connected to file
    Scanner s = null;
    try
    {
      s = new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader(inFile)));
    }
    catch(FileNotFoundException fe)
    {
      System.out.println("File " + inFile + " not found!");
      return;
    }
    
    // Get an output writer connected to file
    PrintWriter out = null;
    try 
    {
      out = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(outFile));
    }
    catch(IOException ioe)
    {
      System.out.println("File " + outFile + " could not be created!");
      return;
    }

    // Process file
    while(s.hasNext())
    {
      String str = s.next();
      out.println(str);
    }
    out.flush();
    out.close();
  }
}

Another version

For these notes, I decided to make a funny version of our silly program that would print the words from the input file to the screen if the output file was missing or couldn't be opened for some reason. This required PrintStream instead of PrintWriter, since System.out is a PrintStream. Notice how I misuse exceptions to deal with missing command-line arguments. I should've just checked args!

import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
public class SillyMod
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    // Get file names from args, or print usage message
    // Here we use exceptions instead of checking args.length.
    // This is an example of a bad use of exceptions!!!!!
    String inFile = "", outFile = "";
    try {
      inFile = args[0];
      outFile = args[1];
    }
    catch(Exception e) { // catches ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException's
      if (inFile.equals(""))
      {
	System.out.println("usage: java Silly <inFile> [<outFile>]");
	return;
      }
    }

    // Get our scanner working
    Scanner s = null;
    try
    {
      s = new Scanner(new BufferedReader(new FileReader(inFile)));
    }
    catch(FileNotFoundException fe)
    {
      System.out.println("File doesn't exist ... silly!");
      return;
    }

    // Get our output writer (screen if file can't be created)
    PrintStream out;
    try {
      out = new PrintStream(new FileOutputStream(outFile));
    }
    catch(IOException ioe)
    {
      out = System.out; 
    }

    // Process
    while(s.hasNext())
    {
      String str = s.next();
      out.println(str);
    }
    out.flush();
    out.close();
  }
}