Question

I want to format the output of my java program so that whenever it’s redirected to a file (xl or csv file) I want the output to be comma separated, but when displayed on console it should not be comma separated. These should be at runtime.

Answer 1

From Java 6 onwards we have the Console class. It’s instance can be obtained by System.console() method. If no console device is available at runtime then invocation of this method will return null.

if(null == System.console()) {
    // write to file
    // code
}
else {
    // write to console
    // code
}