Character vs. Byte

Question

Hello ppl,
I will appreciate if someone helps me fix this bugging problem. I have code that has created a text file using DataOutputStream dos = new DataOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(new File("file.txt"), true));
dos.writeChars(str.toString());Now my problem is whenever I open text file created like above in editors like 'vi', 'emacs' etc., they show up as binary (which is expected since I used DataOutputStream to write bytes).
My questions is this:
I want to write another small piece of code that reads this text file and writes them back as plain characters and not binary data. I tried using
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(new File("file.txt")));
PrintWriter pwriter = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(new File("new-File.txt")));
while(true)
     pwriter.print(dis.readChar());I also tried using BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(new File("file.txt"))));and then using str = br.readLine();
pwriter.print(str.toCharArray());I failed each time. Any suggestions on how to obtain text file with plain Ascii characters and not binary data.
Thanks
- Mitesh.

Answer 1

Hi malcolm,
I tried what you suggested. Its not working. All I got in the output file was characters like ????? Everything was a question mark. I tried different encodings. When I tried "UTF-8" I got the original file as output. The code I had used was exactly what you posted. Here is the code that I tried after several attempts of debugging and this works. It might be helpful to others:
BufferedReader br = null;
Writer out = null;
char chr = ' ';
int count = 0;
    try {
      br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("file.txt")));
      out = new FileWriter("fileConverted.txt");
      while(count != -1) { //this denotes end of file
        count = br.read();
        if (count == 0 || count == -1) // loop will break here if EOF detected
          break; // count = 0 indicates unused portion of Unicode character in the file.
        chr = (char)count; //else cast the ASCII value of int to char
        out.write(chr);
        count = br.read(); //Essentially we skip every alternate character in the input file.
// The portion skipped is unused portion of Unicode character.
      br.close();
      out.close();
      System.out.println("Done");
    catch(EOFException ex) {
      ex.printStackTrace();
    catch(IOException ex) {
      ex.printStackTrace();
    catch(NullPointerException ex) {
      ex.printStackTrace();
}