This tutorial will show you how to read and write text and binary files in Java with the classes provided by the package java.io.

The Java API provides classes to read and write files that can be either text files or binary files. You can find many classes for reading and writing files in the java.io package, allowing you to achieve a given task in many ways. In order to avoid cluttering this page, only one example is given for each task in this tutorial. Please refer to the Java API documentation for more examples.

You might also be interested in reading documentation about the package java.nio (New I/O) which was introduced with J2SE 1.4, in particular to add high performance I/O classes to the Java API. In fact, the package java.io will meet your needs for common tasks related with files but if you are doing intensive I/O operations and face performance issues, take a look at the package java.nio.



Several classes are provided by the Java API, such as BufferedReader, FileReader, LineNumberReader, Scanner and InputStreamReader. The class FileTesting shown below contains a single method named readFile(String filePath) that reads the lines of a text file and prints them to the standard output using the BufferedReader class. The method readFile(String filePath) takes as an argument the path of the file to be read.

A path looks something like this for Windows users:

C:\MyDirectory\MyTextFile.txt

For Linux users, a path looks like this:

/home/myName/MyDirectory/MyTextFile.txt.



I could have used the class FileReader alone to read from the text file but I passed a FileReader object to the constructor of the class BufferedReader in order to increase performance. In fact, I wrapped a BufferedReader object around a FileReader object because the BufferedReader object maintains a buffer containing input from the text file. That buffer is created when the constructor of the class BufferedReader is called. Then when the method readLine is invoked, instead of reading from the physical text file, it reads from the buffer, which is much faster. Generally, the classes of the Java API that deal with files and whose names start with "Buffered" maintain a buffer.

As you can see, the exceptions FileNotFoundException and IOException are caught in the method readFile(String filePath). As they are checked exceptions, they must be handled somewhere in the call stack at compile time. The class App shown below calls the method readFile(String filePath). As you can see, I'm passing "MyTextFile.txt" instead of its complete path name (which includes the parent directories) because passing the complete path is not necessary if the file to be read is in the current directory.




You can choose from several classes such as BufferedWriter, FileWriter, OutputStreamWriter and PrintWriter. The method writeFile shown below simply writes two lines of text to a file named MyTextFile.txt using the class BufferedWriter:




The following classes of the Java API allow writing to a binary file: BufferedOutputStream, ByteArrayOutputStream, DataOutputStream, FileOutputStream, ObjetOutputStream, PrintStream and RandomAccessFile. Note that the class RandomAccessFile can also be used for reading a binary file. The method writeFile shown below simply writes 3 bytes to a binary file:




Depending on your needs, you can choose from several classes such as BufferedInputStream, ByteArrayInputStream, DataInputStream, FileInputStream, ObjectInputStream or RandomAccessFile. The method readFile(String filePath) shown below reads a binary file into an array of bytes and prints each byte to the standard output:




An instance of the class File can be seen as a representation of a file or directory that may or may not exist. The class File provides methods that return information about existing files and directories. It also provides methods to create, delete, rename and change the read/write permissions of files and directories. As an example, the method listDirectory(String directoryPathName) shown below prints to the standard output the names of all the files contained in a given directory:




Write a method named copy(String sourceFilePath, String targetFilePath) that copies a source text file to a target text file using the classes BufferedReader and BufferedWriter. If the target text file already exists, the method copy(String sourceFilePath, String targetFilePath) must return without overwriting the existing target text file.