Develop Reference

Confused about reading data from Registry

I am trying to get some data from registry .The problem is while loop ,because when the application is running in debug mode I can view the value of a line variable .But end of the loop line variable is assigned null
private final String DESKTOP_PATH="\"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\"
+ "CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\Shell Folders\" /v Desktop";
private final String REG="REG_SZ";
private final String EXACUTE_STR="reg query "+DESKTOP_PATH;
private String getDesktopPath() throws IOException {
Process p = null;
String line = null;
try {
p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(EXACUTE_STR);
p.waitFor();
InputStream stream=p.getInputStream();
BufferedReader reader=new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(stream));
while((line=reader.readLine())!=null){
line+=reader.readLine();
}
} catch (IOException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
return line;

Consider using jna the Java Native Access library which provides Registry handling utilities.
The reason that I suggest a different toolkit instead of simply solving your problem has to do with a few items. When launching an external executable, you have to handle input and output in a buffered manner, and there are two streams of output (normal and error).
In short, typically all of these input and output streams might need to be available, but you won't typically notice failures when they are not present in the typical development environment. Later, in production environments (headless, console-less, etc) these problems become apparent.
To solve these problems with a CLI call, you typically then set up Buffer collectors to capture the output in independent threads, and sometimes you need to stand up a fake buffer provider (some programs check that input is readable, even if they don't read any input!). The JNA library uses JNI, which greatly reduces the issues by side-stepping the CMD shell that wraps your executable call.
However, if you only wanted to know about the logic error in your code, JimW did a good job explaining it.

You are replacing the contents of line with what you read from reader.readLine(), when that finally returns null you return line which is of course null.
Instead create a StringBuilder before starting the loop and append to that.
StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
while ((line = reader.readLine())!=null) {
buffer.append(line);
}
// buffer.toString() is the String you are looking for
You could also .trim() inside the append if you want to remove end lines.

Check if file exists from string

This is the code I use when I try to read some specific text in a *.txt file:
public void readFromFile(String filename, JTable table) {
BufferedReader bufferedReader = null;
try {
bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
String a,b,c,d;
for(int i=0; i<3; i++)
{
a = bufferedReader.readLine();
b = bufferedReader.readLine();
c = bufferedReader.readLine();
d = bufferedReader.readLine();
table.setValueAt(a, i, 0);
table.setValueAt(b, i, 1);
table.setValueAt(c, i, 2);
table.setValueAt(d, i, 3);
}
} catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
} finally {
//Close the reader
try {
if (bufferedReader != null) {
bufferedReader.close();
}
} catch (IOException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
And it is called in this way:
readFromFile("C:/data/datafile.txt", table1)
The problem is the following: the 1st time I open the program the *.txt file I'm going to read does not exist, so I thought I could use the function exists(). I have no idea about what to do, but I tried this:
if(("C:/data/datafile.txt").exists()) {
readFromFile("C:/data/datafile.txt", table1)
}
It is not working because NetBeans gives me a lot of errors. How could I fix this?

String has no method named exists() (and even if it did it would not do what you require), which will be the cause of the errors reported by the IDE.
Create an instance of File and invoke exists() on the File instance:
if (new File("C:/data/datafile.txt").exists())
{
}

Note: This answer use classes that aren't available on a version less than Java 7.
The method exists() for the object String doesn't exist. See the String documentation for more information. If you want to check if a file exist base on a path you should use Path with Files to verify the existence of the file.
Path file = Paths.get("C:/data/datafile.txt");
if(Files.exists(file)){
//your code here
}
Some tutorial about the Path class : Oracle tutorial
And a blog post about How to manipulate files in Java 7
Suggestion for your code:
I'll point to you the tutorial about try-with-resources as it could be useful to you. I also want to bring your attention on Files#readAllLines as it could help you reduce the code for the reading operation. Based on this method you could use a for-each loop to add all the lines of the file on your JTable.

you can use this code to check if the file exist
Using java.io.File
File f = new File(filePathString);
if(f.exists()) { /* do something */ }

You need to give it an actual File object. You're on the right track, but NetBeans (and java, for that matter) has no idea what '("C:/data/datafile.txt")' is.
What you probably wanted to do there was create a java.io.File object using that string as the argument, like so:
File file = new File ("C:/data/datafile.txt");
if (file.exists()) {
readFromFile("C:/data/datafile.txt", table1);
}
Also, you were missing a semicolon at the end of the readFromFile call. Im not sure if that is just a typo, but you'll want to check on that as well.
If you know you're only ever using this File object just to check existence, you could also do:
if (new File("C:/data/datafile.txt").exists()) {
readFromFile("C:/data/datafile.txt", table1);
}

If you want to ensure that you can read from the file, it might even be appropriate to use:
if(new File("C:/data/datafile.txt").canRead()){
...
}
as a condition, in order to verify that the file exists and you have sufficient permissions to read from the file.
Link to canRead() javadoc

Reading InputStream from a batch file's process skips to next line

I am trying to run a batch file with Runtime.exec() and then output its InputStream into a JTextArea. What I have works, but only partially. What happens is the batch file runs, but if it executes a command other than something like "echo" that command immediately terminates and the next line executes. For example, let's say I try to run a simple batch file like this:
#echo off
echo hello. waiting 5 seconds.
timeout /t 5 /nobreak > NUL
echo finished. goodbye.
The batch file executes, and the JTextArea says
hello. waiting 5 seconds.
finished. goodbye.
but it doesn't wait for 5 seconds in the middle.
I can't figure out why it's doing this. Here's what I use to run the batch file and read its InputStream.
private class ScriptRunner implements Runnable {
private final GUI.InfoGUI gui; // the name of my GUI class
private final String script;
public ScriptRunner(final GUI.InfoGUI gui, final File script) {
this.gui = gui;
this.script = script.getAbsolutePath();
}
#Override
public void run() {
try {
final Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(script);
StreamReader output = new StreamReader(p.getInputStream(), gui);
Thread t = new Thread(output);
t.start();
int exit = p.waitFor();
output.setComplete(true);
while (t.isAlive()) {
sleep(500);
}
System.out.println("Processed finished with exit code " + exit);
} catch (final Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
private class StreamReader implements Runnable {
private final InputStream is;
private final GUI.InfoGUI gui;
private boolean complete = false;
public StreamReader(InputStream is, GUI.InfoGUI gui) {
this.is = is;
this.gui = gui;
}
#Override
public void run() {
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
try {
while (!complete || in.ready()) {
while (in.ready()) {
gui.setTextAreaText(in.readLine() + "\n");
}
sleep(250);
}
} catch (final Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
try {
in.close();
} catch (final Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
public void setComplete(final boolean complete) {
this.complete = complete;
}
}
public void sleep(final long ms) {
try {
Thread.sleep(ms);
} catch (final InterruptedException ie) {
}
}
I know my code is pretty messy, and I'm sure it contains grammatical errors.
Thanks for anything you can do to help!

You're creating a Process but you're not reading from its standard error stream. The process might be writing messages to its standard error to tell you that there's a problem, but if you're not reading its standard error, you won't be able to read these messages.
You have two options here:
Since you already have a class that reads from a stream (StreamReader), wire up another one of these to the process's standard error stream (p.getErrorStream()) and run it in another Thread. You'll also need to call setComplete on the error StreamReader when the call to p.waitFor() returns, and wait for the Thread running it to die.
Replace your use of Runtime.getRuntime().exec() with a ProcessBuilder. This class is new in Java 5 and provides an alternative way to run external processes. In my opinion its most significant improvement over Runtime.getRuntime().exec() is the ability to redirect the process's standard error into its standard output, so you only have one stream to read from.
I would strongly recommend going for the second option and choosing to redirect the process's standard error into its standard output.
I took your code and replaced the line
final Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(script);
with
final ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder(script);
pb.redirectErrorStream(true);
final Process p = pb.start();
Also, I don't have your GUI code to hand, so I wrote the output of the process to System.out instead.
When I ran your code, I got the following output:
hello. waiting 5 seconds.
ERROR: Input redirection is not supported, exiting the process immediately.
finished. goodbye.
Processed finished with exit code 0
Had you seen that error message, you might have twigged that something was up with the timeout command.
Incidentally, I noticed in one of your comments that none of the commands suggested by ughzan worked. I replaced the timeout line with ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > NUL and the script ran as expected. I couldn't reproduce a problem with this.

The problem is definitely in timeout.exe. If you add echo %errorlevel% after line with timeout, you will see that it returns 1 if running from java. And 0 if running in usual way. Probably, it requires some specific console functionality (i.e. cursor positioning) that is suppressed when running from java process.
Is there anything I can do to get this to work while running from Java
If you don't need ability to run any batch file then consider to replace timeout with ping. Otherwise... I've tried to run batch file with JNA trough Kernel32.CreateProcess and timeout runs fine. But then you need to implement reading of process output trough native calls also.
I hope someone will suggest better way.

The ready method only tells if the stream can guarantee that something can be read immediately, without blocking. You can't really trust it because always returning false is a valid implementation. Streams with buffers may return true only when they have something buffered. So I suspect your problem is here:
while (!complete || in.ready()) {
while (in.ready()) {
gui.setTextAreaText(in.readLine() + "\n");
}
sleep(250);
}
It should rather read something like this:
String line;
while (!complete || (line=in.readLine()) != null) {
gui.setTextAreaText(line + "\n");
}

It's probably because your "timeout ..." command returned with an error.
Three ways to test it:
Check if the "timeout ..." command works in the Windows command prompt.
Replace "timeout ..." in the script with "ping -n 5 127.0.0.1 > NUL" (it essentially does the same thing)
Remove everything but "timeout /t 5 /nobreak > NUL" from your script. The process should return with an error (1) if the timeout failed because it is the last command executed.

Outputting result of "dir" to console in Java

I want to output the result of the "dir" command to the java console. I have already looked on Google and here, but none of the examples work for me, thus making me rite this post.
My code is as follows:
try
{
System.out.println("Thread started..");
String line = "";
String cmd = "dir";
Process child = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd);
//Read output
BufferedReader dis = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader(child.getInputStream() ));
while ((line = dis.readLine()) != null)
{
System.out.println("Line: " + line);
}
dis.close();
}catch (IOException e){
}
What am I doing wrong?
Any help would be very nice.
Thanks in advance,
Darryl

You cannot run "dir" as a process, you need to change it to String cmd = "cmd dir";.
You don't handle the exception at all. adding the line e.printStackTrace()); in the catch block would tell you what I wrote in (1). Never ignore exceptions!
You don't handle error stream. This might cause your program to hang, handle error stream and read from both streams (error and input) in parallel using different streams.

The best way is to use commons exec http://commons.apache.org/exec/
This has things that catch quirks that can really drive you up the wall, such as the whole process blocking if you didn't clear its output stream, escaping quotes in commands, etc.
Here is a method that will run the del command in windows successfully. Note the use of cmd since del is not a standalone executable:
private void deleteWithCmd(File toDelete) throws IOException {
CommandLine cmdLine = new CommandLine("cmd.exe");
cmdLine.addArgument("/C");
cmdLine.addArgument("del");
cmdLine.addArgument(toDelete.getAbsolutePath());
DefaultExecutor executor = new DefaultExecutor();
int exitValue = executor.execute(cmdLine);
}

a) What is the java console?
b) You should use javas File.listFiles () instead of Runtime.exec, which isn't portable, and makes Name splitting neccessary - a hard thing, for filenames which contain spaces, blanks, newlines and so on.
c) Whats wrong with your code?
d) Why don't you do anything in the case of Exception?

Here is a more thorough example that accounts for OS versions and error conditions ( as stated by MByD above)
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2000/jw-1229-traps.html?page=4
Remember that using "exec" means that your application is no longer cross-platform and loses one of the main advantages of Java.
A better approach is to use java.io package.
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/dirs.html

You can also do something like that in java 6 :
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FilenameFilter;
import java.io.IOException;
public class ListFilesFromRegExp {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
File dir = new File("files/");
File[] files = dir.listFiles(new FilenameFilter() {
public boolean accept(File dir, String name) {
return name.matches("File[0-9].c");
}
});
for (int i = 0; i < files.length; i++) {
System.out.println(files[i].getAbsolutePath());
}
}
}

FFMPEG in Java issue

I have the following code in a java Web Service:
public boolean makeFile(String fileName, String audio)
{
if (makeUserFolder())
{
File file = new File(getUserFolderPath() + fileName + amr);
FileOutputStream fileOutputStream = null;
try
{
file.createNewFile();
fileOutputStream = new FileOutputStream(file);
fileOutputStream.write(Base64.decode(audio));
return true;
}
catch(FileNotFoundException ex)
{
return false;
}
catch(IOException ex)
{
return false;
}
finally{
try {
fileOutputStream.close();
convertFile(fileName);
} catch (IOException ex) {
Logger.getLogger(FileUtils.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
}
}
}
else
return false;
}
public boolean convertFile(String fileName)
{
Process ffmpeg;
String filePath = this.userFolderPath + fileName;
try {
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("ffmpeg","-i",filePath + amr,filePath + mp3);
pb.redirectErrorStream();
ffmpeg = pb.start();
} catch (IOException ex) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
It used to work and now it simply won't execute the ffmpeg conversion for some reason. I thought it was a problem with my file but after running the command from terminal no errors are thrown or anything, thought it was maybe permissions issue but all the permissions have been granted in the folder I'm saving the files. I noticed that the input BufferedReader ins being set to null after running the process, any idea what's happening?

First of all, a small nitpick with your code...when you create the FileOutputStream you create it using a string rather than a File, when you have already created the File before, so you might as well recycle that rather than force the FileOutputStream to instantiate the File itself.
Another small nitpick is the fact that when you are writing out the audio file, you should enclose that in a try block and close the output stream in a finally block. If you are allowed to add a new library to your project, you might use Guava which has a method Files.write(byte[],File), which will take care of all the dirty resource management for you.
The only thing that I can see that looks like a definite bug is the fact that you are ignoring the error stream of ffmpeg. If you are blocking waiting for input on the stdout of ffmpeg, then it will not work.
The easiest way to take care of this bug is to use ProcessBuilder instead of Runtime.
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("ffmpeg","-i",filePath+amr,filePath+mp3);
pb.redirectErrorStream(); // This will make both stdout and stderr be redirected to process.getInputStream();
ffmpeg = pb.start();
If you start it this way, then your current code will be able to read both input streams fully. It is possible that the stderr was hiding some error that you were not able to see due to not reading it.
If that was not your problem, I would recommend using absolute paths with ffmpeg...in other words:
String lastdot = file.getName().lastIndexOf('.');
File mp3file = new File(file.getParentFile(),file.getName().substring(0,lastdot)+".mp3");
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder("ffmpeg","-i",file.getAbsolutePath(),mp3file.getAbsolutePath());
// ...
If that doesn't work, I would change ffmpeg to be an absolute path as well (in order to rule out path issues).
Edit: Further suggestions.
I would personally refactor the writing code into its own method, so that you can use it elsewhere necessary. In other other words:
public static boolean write(byte[] content, File to) {
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(to);
try {
fos.write(content);
} catch (IOException io) {
// logging code here
return false;
} finally {
closeQuietly(fos);
}
return true;
}
public static void closeQuietly(Closeable toClose) {
if ( toClose == null ) { return; }
try {
toClose.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
// logging code here
}
}
The reason that I made the closeQuietly(Closeable) method is due to the fact that if you do not close it in that way, there is a possibility that an exception will be thrown by the close() method, and that exception will obscure the exception that was thrown originally. If you put these in a utility class (although looking at your code, I assume that the class that it is currently in is named FileUtils), then you will be able to use them throughout your application whenever you need to deal with file output.
This will allow you to rewrite the block as:
File file = new File(getUserFolderPath() + fileName + amr);
file.createNewFile()
write(Base64.decode(audio),file);
convertFile(fileName);
I don't know whether or not you should do this, however if you want to be sure that the ffmpeg process has completed, then you should say ffmpeg.waitFor(); to be sure that it has completed. If you do that, then you should examine ffmpeg.exitValue(); to make sure that it completed successfully.
Another thing that you might want to do is once it has completed, write what it output to a log file so you have a record of what happened, just in case something happens.