parseInt and NumberFormatException in music exercise

[birdmcfarland]

Hi. I am in a beginning programming class and we are learning Java. Out latest lab assignment is to read a txt file of songs and output the info in various formats using arrays.
One of the required methods is Integer.parseInt. When I use that method I keep getting a NumberFormatException. I read a number of websites about this but I still can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I thought my code was correct, but I guess not.
Any ideas? thanks!

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class MuTunes {

	/**
	 * @param args
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
		Scanner musicDataInput = new Scanner(new File("Music.txt"));
		processMusic(musicDataInput);

	}

	public static void processMusic(Scanner musicDataInput) {
		int totalNumberOfSongs = musicDataInput.nextInt();
		musicDataInput.nextLine();
		String[] songTitle = new String[totalNumberOfSongs];
		String[] artist = new String[totalNumberOfSongs];
		int[] time = new int[totalNumberOfSongs];
		
		int songNumber = 0;
		System.out.printf("%-24s %-24s %4s", "TITLE", "ARTIST", "TIME\n");
		
		while (musicDataInput.hasNextLine()) {
			String lineOfMusicData = musicDataInput.nextLine();
			String[] splitLine;
			splitLine = lineOfMusicData.split(":");
			String timeAsString = splitLine[0];
			int songTime = Integer.parseInt(timeAsString.trim());
			time[songNumber] = songTime;
			artist[songNumber] = splitLine[1];
			songTitle[songNumber] = splitLine[2];
			songNumber++;
			

		}
		for (int i = 0; i < totalNumberOfSongs; i++)
			System.out.printf("%-24s%-24s%4d\n", songTitle[i], artist[i], time[i]);
		

	}
}

and here's the message I'm getting:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: ""
	at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(NumberFormatException.java:48)
	at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:470)
	at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:499)
	at MuTunes.processMusic(MuTunes.java:30)
	at MuTunes.main(MuTunes.java:11)
TITLE                    ARTIST                   TIME

[DarrylBurke]

The error message tells you what's wrong. What's the numeric value of the empty String? It can't be computed, hence the error.

You have to ensure that you won't be attempting to pass parseInt(...) an empty String, either by controlling the contents of the file that is being read, or by testing for an empty String (read the methods of the String class) and assigning 0 as the value, if that's reasonable for the use case.

db

[birdmcfarland]

The numeric value of the string is the song time. I split one of the song lines (which contains song time, artist, and title) delimited by colons. The first value is the song time which is the first value (0) in that array.

String timeAsString = splitLine[0];
int songTime = Integer.parseInt(timeAsString.trim());

I don't understand why this is considered empty when I assigned it the first value in the array.

[birdmcfarland]

this is what I'm thinking this does but clearly I'm wrong:

splitLine = lineOfMusicData.split(":"); //separate the line into its colon-delimited sections
			String timeAsString = splitLine[0];     // assign the first of those sections to timeAsString
			int songTime = Integer.parseInt(timeAsString.trim()); //turn this string of numbers into integers

Here's the txt file:


10
400:Red Headed Stranger:Willie Nelson
303:40 Oz. To Freedom:Sublime
203:White Trash:SCOTS
315:Bigmouth Strikes Again:The Smiths
429:The Singing Bird:Sinéad O'Connor
321:Oro, Se Do :Sinéad O'Connor
307:A Fine Spring Morning:Blossom Dearie
302:La Dolce Vita:Nino Rota
236:Straight to Hell:Hank Williams III
615:Rooster:Alice in Chains

[DarrylBurke]

Print each line immediately after you read it, with delimiters so you can see where it starts and ends

System.out.println("["+lineOfMusicData+"]");

Then print the first element of the array immediately after you split the line

System.out.println("["+splitLine[0]+"]");

I rather suspect your file ends with a blank line.

db

[birdmcfarland]

hah! It did have lines at the end of the txt file! I went back to that several times to make sure that it was formatted correctly but never thought to look for blank lines at the end. Another lesson learned! It works now after deleting the lines.
Thanks so much for your help and for the tip about printing after the line to check, it's greatly appreciated.

[DarrylBurke]

You're welcome, and use the approach of printing and examining anything that's suspect whenever you have a runtime problem. That's debugging 101.

db