Question

I have to read a text file and based on some logic, make some changes to the file. So I am reading the file line by line by using

 while ( (temp_string = inputstream.readLine()) != null )
 {
    /*after employing some other logic*/
    outputstream.write(temp_string);
    outputstream.flush();
}

Where temp_string is a String, and the declaration for inputstream is :

BufferedReader inputstream  = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(pathtosilentfile)); 

and the declaration of outputstream is :

BufferedWriter outputstream = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(pathtooutputfile));

But when i write to the text file (new one) there is a lot of garbage, that shows on notepad++ as NULL. Also, the written data looks ok in notepad or wordpad. So is this some kind of an encoding error ? I dont get it ! Whats going wronng ?

Answer 1

It would really have helped if you’d told us what output_stream is – but it should be a Writer of some description – probably an OutputStreamWriter wrapped around a FileStream, specifying the appropriate encoding (which is up to you, I guess).

If it looks okay in Notepad / Wordpad, but broken in Notepad++, then it probably is an encoding issue, but you ought to decide which encoding to use. UTF-8 is often a good choice (compact for ASCII, covers the whole of Unicode, widely supported) but it depends on what needs to read the file.