Reading from and writing to file

[dyelax]

Hey guys, so I'm programming a snake game and I'm trying to include a feature that saves a person's high score. I'm trying to use BufferedReader and BufferedWriter to read and write to a .txt file in the bin of my project. (if this isn't the right way to go about it, let me know.) Whenever I initialize the game, the high score is displayed as -1. Apparently this is what is returned when the reader reaches the end of the stream. (not really sure what this means or why its happening.) and even if I pre-enter a number into the .txt file, when I run the program and then go back to look at it, the file is completely empty. I made this SSCCE to show my problem. The score goes up whenever you press a key.

import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.io.*;

public class GameSSCCE extends Applet implements KeyListener{
	private int score, highScore;
	private BufferedReader read;
	private BufferedWriter save;

	public void init(){
		setSize(200,100);
		setFocusable(true);
		addKeyListener(this);
		try {
			read = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("High Score Test.txt"));
			save = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("High Score Test.txt"));
			highScore = read.read();//Reading -1. End of stream?
			read.close();
		} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		
	}
	
	public void paint(Graphics g){ 
		g.drawString("High Score: "+highScore, 50, 50); 
		g.drawString("Score: "+score, 50, 65); 
		}
	
	public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) {
		score++;
		if(score > highScore)
			highScore = score;
		repaint();
	}	
	
	public void stop(){
		try {
			save.write(highScore);
			save.close();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
	
	public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) {}
	public void keyTyped(KeyEvent e) {}
}

[doWhile]

Think about how your code works. It first creates a Reader to read from a File. In the very next line, it creates a writer which creates a new File by that name (meaning the previous file is overwritten). In other words, I wouldn't recommend mixing up the reading/writing like this. If you want to read the file, read it and then close it. If you want to write to it, write to it and then close it.

[Tolls]

Yep.
You only need to read from the file once, to get the current highscore.
That should be a method which opens the reader, reads the high score, then closes the reader and returns the value.

You only need to write to the file once, to replace the highscore with a new one.
That also should be a method, which opens the writer, writes the high score, then closes the writer.

[dyelax]

This solved the problem, thanks!