Develop Reference

Creating a text file with java without using absolute path

following the question I asked before How to have my java project to use some files without using their absolute path? I found the solution but another problem popped up in creating text files that I want to write into.here's my code:
private String pathProvider() throws Exception {
//finding the location where the jar file has been located
String jarPath=URLDecoder.decode(getClass().getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().getPath(), "UTF-8");
//creating the full and final path
String completePath=jarPath.substring(0,jarPath.lastIndexOf("/"))+File.separator+"Records.txt";
return completePath;
}
public void writeRecord() {
try(Formatter writer=new Formatter(new FileWriter(new File(pathProvider()),true))) {
writer.format("%s %s %s %s %s %s %s %s %n", whichIsChecked(),nameInput.getText(),lastNameInput.getText()
,idInput.getText(),fieldOfStudyInput.getText(),date.getSelectedItem().toString()
,month.getSelectedItem().toString(),year.getSelectedItem().toString());
successful();
} catch (Exception e) {
failure();
}
}
this works and creates the text file wherever the jar file is running from but my problem is that when the information is been written to the file, the numbers,symbols, and English characters are remained but other characters which are in Persian are turned into question marks. like: ????? 111 ????? ????.although running the app in eclipse doesn't make this problem,running the jar does.
Note:I found the code ,inside pathProvider method, in some person's question.

Your pasted code and the linked question are complete red herrings - they have nothing whatsoever to do with the error you ran into. Also, that protection domain stuff is a hack and you've been told before not to write data files next to your jar files, it's not how OSes (are supposed to) work. Use user.home for this.
There is nothing in this method that explains the question marks - the string, as returned, has plenty of issues (see above), but NOT that it will result in question marks in the output.
Files are fundamentally bytes. Strings are fundamentally characters. Therefore, when you write code that writes a string to a file, some code somewhere is converting chars to bytes.
Make sure the place where that happens includes a charset encoding.
Use the new API (I think you've also been told to do this, by me, in an earlier question of yours) which defaults to UTF-8. Alternatively, specify UTF-8 when you write. Note that the usage of UTF-8 here is about the file name, not the contents of it (as in, if you put persian symbols in the file name, it's not about persian symbols in the contents of the file / in the contents you want to write).
Because you didn't paste the code, I can't give you specific details as there are hundreds of ways to do this, and I do not know which one you used.
To write to a file given a String representing its path:
Path p = Paths.get(completePath);
Files.write("Hello, World!", p);
is all you need. This will write as UTF_8, which can handle persian symbols (because the Files API defaults to UTF-8 if you specify no encoding, unlike e.g. new File, FileOutputStream, FileWriter, etc).
If you're using outdated APIs: new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(thePath), StandardCharsets.UTF-8) - but note that this is a resource leak bug unless you add the appropriate try-with-resources.
If you're using FileWriter: FileWriter is broken, never use this class. Use something else.
If you're converting the string on its own, it's str.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8), not str.getBytes().

encode œ correctly with UTF-8 - java

I am having problems to write out the following string into a file correctly. Especially with the character "œ". The Problem appears on my local machine (Windows 7) and on the server (Linux)
String: "Cœurs d’artichauts grillées"
Does Work (œ gets displays correctly, while the apostrophe get translated into a question mark):
Files.write(path, content.getBytes(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1));
Does not work (result in file):
Files.write(path, content.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
According to the first answer of this question, UTF-8 should be able to encode the œ correctly as well. Has anyone have an idea what i am doing wrong?

Your second approach works
String content = "Cœurs d’artichauts grillées";
Path path = Paths.get("out.txt");
Files.write(path, content.getBytes(Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
Is producing an out.txt file with:
Cœurs d’artichauts grillées
Most likely the editor you are using is not displaying the content correctly. You might have to force your editor to use the UTF-8 encoding and a font that displays œ and other UTF-8 characters. Notepad++ or IntelliJ IDEA work out of the box.

How to get only the name of my PDF file

I'm developing a project for college which consist reading a CSV file and converting that to a PDF file. That part is fine, I have already done that.
In the end I need to show the name of the PDF file without the full path of where it was created. In other words, I just want the to show the name.
I search a lot to see if there is a simple method that show the name like Java has to show only the name of the File like
file.getName();

Whenever you use iText to create a PDF file, your code sets the target which usually is an OutputStream. If you use a FileOutputStream there, you know the file it writes to.
Thus, all you have to do to to show the name of the PDF File is to inspect your own code and check which target it sets.

Use getBaseName in Apache Commons IO.
getBaseName
public static String getBaseName(String filename)
Gets the base name, minus the full path and extension, from a full
filename.
This method will handle a file in either Unix or Windows format. The
text after the last forward or backslash and before the last dot is
returned.
a/b/c.txt --> c
a.txt --> a
a/b/c --> c
a/b/c/ --> ""
The output will be the same irrespective of the machine that the code
is running on.
Parameters:
filename - the filename to query, null returns null
Returns:
the name of the file without the path, or an empty string if none exists. Null bytes inside string will be removed
Source: https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-2.5/org/apache/commons/io/FilenameUtils.html#getBaseName(java.lang.String)
If you also need the extension, use getExtension. Which would probably always be .pdf, but you know, it's perfectly valid to have a PDF file without the .pdf filename extension. No sane person would do that but it is better to be prepared for insane users.

Java Character Encoding Writing to Text File

My Issue is as follows:
Having issue with character encoding when writing to text file. The issue is characters are not showing the intended value. for example I am writing ' '(which is probably a Tab character) and 'Â' is what is displayed in the text file.
Background information
This data is being stored on a MSQL Database. The Database Collation is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and the fields are varchar. I've come to learn the collation and type determine what character encoding is used on the database side. Values are stored correctly so no issues here.
My Java application runs queries to pull the data from the DB and this too also looks OK. I have debugged the code and seen all the Strings have the correct representation before writing to the file.
Next I write the text to the .TXT file using a OutputStreamWriter as follows:
public OfferFileBuilder(String clientAppName, boolean isAppend) throws IOException, URISyntaxException {
String exportFileLocation = getExportedFileLocation();
File offerFile = new File(getDatedFileName(exportFileLocation+"/"+clientAppName+"_OFFERRECORDS"));
bufferedWriter = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(offerFile, isAppend), "UTF-8"));
}
Now once I open up the file on the Linux server by running cat command on file or open up the file using notepad++ some of the characters are incorrectly displaying.
I've ran the following commands on the server to see its encoding locale charmap which prints UTF-8, echo $LANG which prints en_US.UTF-8, and echo $LC_CTYPE` prints nothing.
Here is what I've attempted so far.
I've attempted to change the Character encoding used by the OutputStreamWriter I've tried UTF-8, and CP1252. When switching encoding some characters are fixed when others are then improperly displayed.
My Question is this:
Which encoding should my OutputStreamWriter be using?
(Bonus Questions) how are we supposed to avoid issues like this from happening. The rule of thumb i was provided was use UTF-8 and you will never run into problems, but this isn't the case for me right now.

running file -bi command on the server revealed that the file was encoded with ascii instead of utf8. Removing the file completely and rerunning the process fixed this for me.

Failed to check if file with German name is exist in the file system

Background:
I have 2 machines: one is running German windows 7 and my PC running English(with Hebrew locale) windows 7.
In my Perl code I'm trying to check if the file that I got from the German machine exists on my machine.
The file name is ßßßzllpoöäüljiznppü.txt
Why is it failed when I do the following code:
use Encode;
use Encode::locale;
sub UTF8ToLocale
{
my $str = decode("utf8",$_[0]);
return encode(locale, $str);
}
if(!-e UTF8ToLocale($read_file))
{
print "failed to open the file";
}
else
{
print $read_file;
}
Same thing goes also when I'm trying to open the file:
open (wtFile, ">", UTF8ToLocale($read_file));
binmode wtFile;
shift #_;
print wtFile #_;
close wtFile;
The file name is converted from German to utf8 in my java application and this is passed to the perl script.
The perl script takes this file name and convert it from utf8 to the system locale, see UTF8ToLocale($read_file) function call, and I believe that is the problem.
Questions:
Can you please tell me what is the OS file system charset encoding?
When I create German file name in OS that the locale is Hebrew in which Charset is it saved?
How do I solve this problem?
Update:
Here is another code that I run with hard coded file name on my PC, the script file is utf8 encoded:
use Encode;
use Encode::locale;
my $string = encode("utf-16",decode("utf8","C:\\TestPerl\\ßßßzllpoöäüljiznppü.txt"));
if (-e $string)
{
print "exists\r\n";
}
else
{
print "not exists\r\n"
}
The output is "not exists".
I also tried different charsets: cp1252, cp850, utf-16le, nothing works.
If I'm changing the file name to English or Hebrew(my default locale) it works.
Any ideas?

Windows 7 uses UTF-16 internally [citation needed] (I don't remember the byte order). You don't need to convert file names because of that. However, if you transport the file via a FAT file system (eg an old USB stick) or other non Unicode aware file systems these benefits will get lost.
The locale setting you are talking about only affects the language of the user interface and the apparent folder names (Programme (x86) vs. Program Files (x86) with the latter being the real name in the file system).
The larger problem I can see is the internal encoding of the file contents that you want to transfer as some applications may default to different encodings depending on the locale. There is no solution to that except being explicit when the file is created. Sticking to UTF-8 is generally a good idea.
And why do you convert the file names with another tool? Any Unicode encoding should be sufficient for transfer.
Your script does not work because you reference an undefined global variable called $read_file. Assuming your second code block is not enclosed in any scope, especially not in a sub, then the #_ variable is not available. To get command line arguments you should consider using the #ARGV array. The logic ouf your script isn't clear anyway: You print error messages to STDOUT, not STDERR, you "decode" the file name and then print out the non-decoded string in your else-branch, you are paranoid about encodings (which is generally good) but you don't specify an encoding for your output stream etc.