Question

So I have the following code to check for the text file called Doctors.txt

It has the following information:

35000   2000    AV122258C   Dr Alex James   CARDIO
30500   2005    AB347433C   Miss Elizabeth Kooper   MB
32653   1995    JA103240B   Dr Mohammed Khan    ON
64400   2001    JG371458A   Dr Tom Jacob    CARDIO
91000   2002    IH102411Y   Dr Rahana Mohammed  ON 
55000   1987    JJ405626N   Dr Mary Francis AN
87000   1988    WQ333452N   Mr Mark Cromwell    NEURO
60500   1998    HK413942S   Mr Victor Jacob GASTRO
40000   2003    AJ103006X   Dr Mia Larson   GS
42000   2003    ER148468D   Dr Rizwan Hussain   GS
38000   2004    RB193984P   Dr Lam Yeng HAE

The class file it self…

import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.io.IOException;

public class FileHandler
 {
/**
 * Save all doctor records to a file
 * @param doctors  the DoctorList to save
 */
public void saveRecords(DoctorList doctors)
{  
      PrintWriter writer = null;
    try
    {   // NB: the file name is hard-coded
        writer = new PrintWriter("Doctors.txt");
        writer.println(doctors.toString());
        writer.flush();
    }
    catch(IOException e)
    {
        System.out.println("Error writing file");
    }
    finally
    {
        writer.close();
    }
}

/**
 * Load doctor records from the file
 * @param doctors  the DoctorList to add doctors to
 */
public void readRecords(DoctorList doctors)
{
    FileReader reader = null;
    try
    {
       // NB: the file name is hard-coded
        reader = new FileReader("Doctors.txt");
        Scanner sc = new Scanner(reader);

        String record;
        String[] data;
            Doctor doctor;
        while(sc.hasNextLine())
        {
            record = sc.nextLine();
            if(record.length() != 0)
            {
                data = record.split("\t", 5);
                      doctor = DoctorFactory.newDoctor(data[3], data[0], data[2], data[1], data[4]);
                doctors.add(doctor);
            }
        }
    }
    catch(IOException e)
    {
        System.out.println("Error reading file");
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
 }
}

I’ve put it within the same area like so:

However it seems that when I run the main class, it cannot read the contents…

Answer 1

The path is your problem. Try this:

 reader = new FileReader("src/Doctors.txt");

A better solution is to not rely on file paths and use getResourceAsStream() to return an InputStream from the CLASSPATH.