Java Example
Resources
Video Script
Now let’s see if we can write our own program that deals with files and directories. For starters, let’s take a look at the problem statement.
Whaaaa? That looks pretty complex. Just like we do with all of these examples, let’s break it down into smaller parts and see if we can build it one step at a time.
For starter, we need to build a program that accepts 3 files as command-line arguments. If there aren’t exactly 3 arguments, we should print an error and exit the program. So, we can use a simple If-Then statement to handle this part of the problem.
Next, we know that the first two files are input files that we need to read, and the third file is an output file that we should write to. So, we’ll need to try and open these files for reading and writing. To do that, we’ll use a Try with Resources statement, and import the various libraries we need to accomplish that task.
Now we can think about the possible exceptions. We’ll have to consider an InvalidPathException, a NoSuchFileException if we try to open a file for reading that doesn’t exist, as well as an IOException if we run into any issues reading or writing to any of these files. In each case, we’ll just print out the message “Invalid Arguments” and use the return keyword to exit the program.
That’s all we need for our starter code. So, let’s dive in deeper. We’ll place the following code where this “more code goes here” comment is in our starter code.
Once we’ve opened the files, we’ll need to read the contents of the two input files. According to the problem statement, each one contains a list of whole numbers, one per line. So, we’ll create two While loops, one for each file, and inside of the loop we’ll read lines of input from the file until we run out.
Next, we can convert that input to an integer. However, this could cause an exception to occur if the input cannot be converted to an integer, so we’ll need to go back to our starter code and add an additional catch statement to handle a NumberFormatException. In that case, we’ll print the “Invalid Input” message.
So, back to our inner code. The program should keep track of the sum and count of both the even and odd inputs from each file. So, we’ll use a simple If-Then statement to determine if the input is even or odd. Then, inside of those If-Then statements, we’ll update the variables for the count and sum of each type of number. It seems like quite a bit of code, but it should hopefully be pretty straightforward to see how it works.
Finally, we’ll need to write some output to the output file. To make it easier to read, we’ll place that code where the “more code goes here” comment is in this code.
The output is also pretty simple. The problem statement gives us an example of what it should look like. We’ll just print the four numbers, each on a separate line, in the order given. In this example, I’m using a quick shortcut to convert each number to a string by simply concatenating it after an empty string. Finally, we’re using the newLine() method to print a newline character between each number, so they will be on separate lines in the output file.
Lastly, we should make sure we remember to print “Complete” to the terminal before exiting. In this case, we’ll need to use the System.out.println() method to make sure it appears on the terminal and not in our input file.
The problem statement also helpfully reminds us to make sure we close any open files when we are done with them. Thankfully since we are using a Try with Resources statement, that part is automatically handled for us!
There we go! That’s all it takes to build this simple program in Java to explore reading and writing with files. See if you can get it to work yourself!