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Deleting and Renaming file java

I am trying to delete and rename a file however the delete() and rename() function does not work. I can't seem to find the bug in the code as it should run properly by logic (i think). Can anyone tell me why it can't delete a fill. this code works except deleting old txt and renaming temp.txt to old file.
public Boolean deleteItem(String item){
try{
// creating and opening file
File f = new File("temp.txt");
f.delete(); // to delete existing data inside file;
File old = new File(file);
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter(new File("temp.txt"), true);
FileReader fr = new FileReader(old);
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(fr);
String s;
// creating temporary item object
String[] strArr;
//searching for data inside the file
while ((s = reader.readLine()) != null){
strArr = s.split("\\'");
if (!strArr[0].equals(item)){
writer.append(s + System.getProperty("line.separator"));
}
}
//rename old file to file.txt
old.delete();
boolean successful = f.renameTo(new File(file));
writer.flush();
writer.close();
fr.close();
reader.close();
return successful;
}
catch(Exception e){ e.printStackTrace();}
return false;
}

The logic seems a little tangled. Here's what I think it looks like.
You delete file.txt
You create a new file.txt and copy 'file' into it
You delete 'file'
You rename file.txt to 'file'
You close input and output files
My guess would be that your operating system (unspecified) is preventing deletes and renames of open files. Move the closing to before the delete/rename. And check the return from those functions.
Aside: as a minor improvement to readability, you don't need to keep calling 'new File(xxx)' with the same xxx. A File is just a representation of the name of the file. Do it once. And 'File tempFile = new File("file.txt")' would be easier to follow than calling it 'f'.

Don't use the old java.io.File. It is notorious for its lax error handling and useless error messages. Use the "newer" NIO.2 java.nio.file.Path and the java.nio.file.Files methods that were added in Java 7.
E.g. the file.delete() method returns false if the file was not deleted. No exception is thrown, so you'll never know why, and since you don't even check the return value, you don't know that it didn't delete the file either.
The file isn't deleted because you still have it open. Close the files before attempting to delete+rename, and do it using try-with-resources, also added in Java 7.
Your code should be the following, through capturing exceptions and turning them into a boolean return value is error-prone (see issue with file.delete()).
public boolean deleteItem(String item){
try {
// creating and opening file
Path tempFile = Paths.get("temp.txt");
Files.deleteIfExists(tempFile); // Throws exception if delete failed
Path oldFile = Paths.get(file);
try ( BufferedWriter writer = Files.newBufferedWriter(tempFile);
BufferedReader reader = Files.newBufferedReader(oldFile); ) {
//searching for data inside the file
for (String line; (line = reader.readLine()) != null; ) {
String[] strArr = line.split("\\'");
if (! strArr[0].equals(item)){
writer.append(line + System.lineSeparator());
}
}
} // Files are flushed and closed here
// replace file with temp file
Files.delete(oldFile); // Throws exception if delete failed
Files.move(tempFile, oldFile); // Throws exception if rename failed
return true;
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
return false;
}
}

Basically you want to remove selected lines from a text file.
The following code uses the stream API1. It filters out all the unwanted lines and writes the lines that you do want to a temporary file. Then it renames the temporary file to your original file, thus effectively removing the unwanted lines from the original file. Note that I am assuming that your "global" variable file is a string.
/* Following imports required.
import java.io.File
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.nio.file.StandardCopyOption;
*/
Path path = Paths.get(file);
final PrintWriter[] pws = new PrintWriter[1];
try {
File tempFile = File.createTempFile("temp", ".txt");
tempFile.deleteOnExit();
pws[0] = new PrintWriter(tempFile);
Files.lines(path)
.filter(l -> !item.equals(l.split("'")[0]))
.forEach(l -> pws[0].println(l));
pws[0].flush();
pws[0].close();
Files.move(tempFile.toPath(), path, StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
}
catch (IOException xIo) {
xIo.printStackTrace();
}
finally {
if (pws[0] != null) {
pws[0].close();
}
}
1 Stream API was introduced in Java 8

Append list of string to end of text file in Android external storage

I am trying to write an array of string into the external storage of Android emulator. Here is my code:
private void writeToFile(String[] data) {
File workingDir = Environment.getExternalStoragePublicDirectory(Environment.DIRECTORY_DOWNLOADS + "/wordlist.txt");
try (BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(workingDir))) {
for (String line : data) {
bw.write(line + "\n");
}
bw.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
It did managed to write each of the item in string array into the text file. However, the next time when I execute this function again, it wipes all the previous existing strings in the text file and replaced them instead. Any ideas on how to keep append new strings to the end of the file?
Thanks!

I solved it already. Basically I need to read all the existing text from the text file, add them to a new list, then append the latest string onto the new list, then proceed to write to the text file.

You can use the append option to append to the existing file without overwriting it.
BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(workingDir, true))
The optional true argument sets the file writer to append mode. Also see the answers here.

Writing new line notepad

Simply trying to move to a new line after printing each element inside of notepad. Some searching has yielded uses of \r\n, but that doesn't seem to work either.
for(String element : misspelledWords)
{
writer.write(element + "\n");
}

try this
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("result.txt"));
for (String element : misspelledWords) {
writer.write(element);
writer.newLine();
}
Adding line separator at the end (like "\n") should work on most OS,but to be on safer side
you should use System.getProperty("line.separator")

Open your file in append mode like this
FileWriter(String fileName, boolean append) when you want to make an object of class FileWrite
in constructor.
File file = new File("C:\\Users\\Izak\\Documents\\NetBeansProjects\\addNewLinetoTxtFile\\src\\addnewlinetotxtfile\\a.txt");
try (Writer newLine = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(file, true));) {
newLine.write("New Line!");
newLine.write(System.getProperty( "line.separator" ));
} catch (IOException e) {
}
Note:
"line.separator" is a Sequence used by operating system to separate lines
in text files
source:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment/sysprop.html

How to Write text file Java

The following code does not produce a file (I can't see the file anywhere).
What is missing?
try {
//create a temporary file
String timeLog = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd_HHmmss").format(
Calendar.getInstance().getTime());
File logFile=new File(timeLog);
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(logFile));
writer.write (string);
//Close writer
writer.close();
} catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

I think your expectations and reality don't match (but when do they ever ;))
Basically, where you think the file is written and where the file is actually written are not equal (hmmm, perhaps I should write an if statement ;))
public class TestWriteFile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
BufferedWriter writer = null;
try {
//create a temporary file
String timeLog = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd_HHmmss").format(Calendar.getInstance().getTime());
File logFile = new File(timeLog);
// This will output the full path where the file will be written to...
System.out.println(logFile.getCanonicalPath());
writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(logFile));
writer.write("Hello world!");
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
try {
// Close the writer regardless of what happens...
writer.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
}
}
}
}
Also note that your example will overwrite any existing files. If you want to append the text to the file you should do the following instead:
writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(logFile, true));

I would like to add a bit more to MadProgrammer's Answer.
In case of multiple line writing, when executing the command
writer.write(string);
one may notice that the newline characters are omitted or skipped in the written file even though they appear during debugging or if the same text is printed onto the terminal with,
System.out.println("\n");
Thus, the whole text comes as one big chunk of text which is undesirable in most cases.
The newline character can be dependent on the platform, so it is better to get this character from the java system properties using
String newline = System.getProperty("line.separator");
and then using the newline variable instead of "\n". This will get the output in the way you want it.

In java 7 can now do
try(BufferedWriter w = ....)
{
w.write(...);
}
catch(IOException)
{
}
and w.close will be done automatically

It's not creating a file because you never actually created the file. You made an object for it. Creating an instance doesn't create the file.
File newFile = new File("directory", "fileName.txt");
You can do this to make a file:
newFile.createNewFile();
You can do this to make a folder:
newFile.mkdir();

Using java 8 LocalDateTime and java 7 try-with statement:
public class WriteFile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String timeLog = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMdd_HHmmss").format(LocalDateTime.now());
File logFile = new File(timeLog);
try (BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(logFile)))
{
System.out.println("File was written to: " + logFile.getCanonicalPath());
bw.write("Hello world!");
}
catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

You can try a Java Library. FileUtils, It has many functions that write to Files.

It does work with me. Make sure that you append ".txt" next to timeLog. I used it in a simple program opened with Netbeans and it writes the program in the main folder (where builder and src folders are).

The easiest way for me is just like:
try {
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("C:/Your/Absolute/Path/YourFile.txt");
writer.write("Wow, this is so easy!");
writer.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
Useful tips & tricks:
Give it a certain path:
new FileWriter("C:/Your/Absolute/Path/YourFile.txt");
New line
writer.write("\r\n");
Append lines into existing txt
new FileWriter("log.txt");
Hope it works!

How to write or append string in loop in a file in java?

I'm having memory problem as working with very large dataset and getting memory leaks with char[] and Strings, don't know why! So I am thinking of writing some processed data in a file and not store in memory. So, I want to write texts from an arrayList in a file using a loop. First the program will check if the specific file already exist in the current working directory and if not then create a file with the specific name and start writing texts from the arrayList line by line using a loop; and if the file is already exist then open the file and append the 1st array value after the last line(in a new line) of the file and start writing other array values in a loop line by line.
Can any body suggest me how can I do this in Java? I'm not that good in Java so please provide some sample code if possible.
Thanks!

I'm not sure what parts of the process you are unsure of, so I'll start at the beginning.
The Serializable interface lets you write an object to a file. Any object that implemsents Serializable can be passed to an ObjectOutputStream and written to a file.
ObjectOutputStream accepts a FileOutputStream as argument, which can append to a file.
ObjectOutputstream outputStream = new ObjectOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("filename", true));
outputStream.writeObject(anObject);
There is some exception handling to take care of, but these are the basics. Note that anObject should implement Serializable.
Reading the file is very similar, except it uses the Input version of the classes I mentioned.

Try this
ArrayList<String> StringarrayList = new ArrayList<String>();
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("output.txt", true);
for(String str: StringarrayList ) {
writer.write(str + "\n");
}
writer.close();

// in main
List<String> SarrayList = new ArrayList<String>();
.....
fill it with content
enter content to SarrayList here.....
write to file
appendToFile (SarrayList);
.....
public void appendToFile (List<String> SarrayList) {
BufferedWriter bw = null;
boolean myappend = true;
try {
bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("myContent.txt", myappend));
for(String line: SarrayList ) {
bw.write(line);
bw.newLine();
}
bw.flush();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
ioe.printStackTrace();
} finally {
if (bw != null) try {
bw.close();
} catch (IOException ioe2) {
// ignore it or write notice
}
}
}