IO help

[sunde887]

I am working on coding up a notepad type app and I am still on the basics of the program. I am working on saving and there are a lot of streams to use, and I am wondering which is the best. Is it better to chain a buffered stream and a file stream? Or is using simply a FileWriter fine?

I am also having some trouble with a finally clause. In the java tutorials I see them saying to close the stream in a finally clause, but when I try this I get an error

FileWriter out = null;
String s = input.getText(); //this is a text area
int ch;
try{
  if(file != null){
    out = new FileWriter(file);
  }
  for(char c : s.toCharArray()){
    ch = (int)c;
    out.write(ch);
  }
  out.flush();
} catch(IOException ioe){
      ioe.printStackTrace();
} finally {
  out.close();
}

When I do something like this I get the following error

C:\Javacode\Notepad>javac notepad.java
notepad.java:64: unreported exception java.io.IOException; must be caught or declared to be thrown
                                                out.close();
                                                         ^
1 error

Is this a good way to be writing ascii text to a file? Or is there a better way?(I don't really want to use NIO yet)

Another question I have, I am able to get it to save to a file but I can't figure out how to get it keep formatting?

I saved something like

my name
is
bob, hello,
world

When I open it in a text editor(windows notepad) it looks like this

my nameisbob, hello,world

Thanks in advance guys, I am trying my best to avoid asking questions so I learn this better I just want to make sure I am not falling into bad io habits(not closing streams, inefficient streams)

[Tolls]

FileWriter should be OK.
Why are you writing individual characters?
Why not write the whole String in one go?

Also, you don't need to flush(). Since you are close()ing right after the flush, and close() calls flush, there's no need to do it separately in this instance.

As for the compiliation error. Wrap the close() call in a try/catch as well and simply log the problem should it occur.

try {
    // do stuff in here
} catch (IOException ex) {
   // log, throw, whatever
} finally {
    try {
        // close the stream
    } catch (IOException ex) {
        // Log it.
    }
}

[sunde887]

Awesome thanks, the extent of my IO at this point is mostly using object streams for serialization. I read a little ahead in the tutorials and I am now using PrintWriter and BufferedReader.

I also just call close() on it after the loop to read or write all the information.

I am however; running into one other small problem, I have implemented save, save as, new, and open successfully, now I am working on deleting the files.

What causes a file to not be able to be deleted when delete() is called?
I tested the file with file.isFile() and it returns true, but the call to file.delete() returns false.

to help, here is the listener for deleting

delete.addActionListener(new ActionListener(){
			public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){
				if(theFile != null){
					int theChoice = JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(
							theFrame,
							"Are you sure you want to delete this file permanently?",
							"Delete?",
							JOptionPane.WARNING_MESSAGE,
							JOptionPane.YES_NO_OPTION
						);
					if(theChoice == JOptionPane.YES_OPTION){
						System.out.println(theFile.isFile());
						System.out.println(theFile);
						System.out.println("Deleting");
						System.out.println(theFile.delete());
					}
				}
				theInputText.setText("");
				theFile = null;
				theFrame.setTitle("My Notepad");
			}
		});

[Tolls]

Possibly if the file is still open somewhere?
That (assuming it's not a permissions thing) is all I can think of offhand.

[sunde887]

Alright, I'll have to continue tinkering and seeing if I can figure it out, thanks for the help Tolls.