How do you write any kind of content you want into a new file using Java?

Question

I know this is extremely basic, but I have absolutely no idea how to do this!
How can I create a brand new file on my machine, this new file containing literally ANYTHING I want: String content; Image content, Excel content, Whatever content.. literally anything on the planet I can come up with..??
I have tried everything I can think of to no avail and have exhausted every online tutorial I could find both here and via Google, to no avail. I can't figure it out, and this is all I have so far:
* FileDownloader.java
* Created on January 10, 2007, 3:47 PM
* To change this template, choose Tools | Template Manager
* and open the template in the editor.
package FileTools;
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
* @author ppowell-c
public class FileDownloader {
    public static void download(URL url, File file) throws IOException {
        InputStream in = url.openStream();
        FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file);
        byte[] b = new byte[1024];
        int len;
        while((len = in.read(b)) != -1) {
            out.write(b, 0, len);
        out.close();
    public static void download(String path, File file) throws IOException {
     download(new URL(path), file);
    public static void download(String path, Object contents) throws IOException {
     ObjectOutputStream out = new ObjectOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(path));
     out.writeObject(contents);
     out.close();
}This code fails to download contents into a new file in the case whereby I want to create a new .ico Icon file with the contents from ImageIcon.getImage() as an example, which is what I want to do right now.
Thanx
Phil

Answer 1

beyond any mortal being? In PHP it's extremely easy,
it's just three lines:
<?
$fileID = @fopen('/path/to/your/file', 'rb');
@fputs($fileID, $contents);  // $contents can be
literally anything, even anobject!
@fclose($fileID);
The thing here is - what is in $contents? I personally don't have a clue how to manually create the contents for a .bmp file for instance - I don't know what should go where in order for a .bmp reader to be able to recognize the file as a "real" bitmap (.bmp) file. I can, however, just put anything I want - anything at all into a file, write it out, calling it a .bmp file. Will it be a .bmp file? No, of course not. So, what is in $contents?
~Bill