Question

I want to return data of type String from my method i created. Eclipse says need to specifiy a return type after the try catch block… When I do that, Eclipse then tells me that I need to declare String data as a Local variable… What is going wrong here?

private String ReadData() {
    try {
        FileInputStream fis = null;
        InputStreamReader isr = null;
        String data = null;
        fis = KVOContact.this.openFileInput("data.txt");
        isr = new InputStreamReader(fis);
        char[] inputBuffer = new char[fis.available()];
        isr.read(inputBuffer);
        data = new String(inputBuffer);
        isr.close();
        fis.close();

    } catch (IOException ioe) {
        Log.e("KVOContact", "IOError" + ioe);
    }
    return data;
}

Answer 1

You’re declaring data within the try block. It’s out of scope outside that block.

You could just move the declaration to before the try block – but personally I think it would probably make more sense to remove the catch block entirely, and declare that the method can throw IOException. You should also close your FileInputStream and InputStreamReader in finally blocks so that you don’t leave them open if an exception is thrown.