Java - InputStream - Weird Characters in the Output!

Question

Hi,
I have a software which outputs lines of numbers one by one. In another java program, I use BufferedReader as follows:
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(pr.getInputStream(),"US-ASCII"));
where pr is the process which runs the software. For each line in the output stream, I try to check whether the first number in the line is greater than a certain value and if it is, I write to another file.
The problem is, when I run the software repeatedly (in a linux cluster) like 10 simulations simultaneously, one of them have got @^@^.... characters followed by some huge numbers. So, I tried eliminating that line alone by using String.matches command but now, it seems even after that I get the error - so, I think it might mean that it is actually during the writing process that the problem occurs. I use BufferedWriter like the following to write it: (I do flush it after writing.)
BufferedWriter out=new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(tmp_file));
I would greatly appreciate if someone can help. This thing really seems to be a huge bottleneck!
Thanks,
Senthil

Answer 1

Hi ejp! Thanks - here is the code!
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.PrintStream;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
//call the class file with the input xml file to simulate
public class RunSim {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String[] xmlFiles = new String[] { "/home/senthil/Simulator/Dessa1.4/" args[0]};
Scanner input=null;
FileWriter ofw=null;
PrintWriter out=null;
for(String file:xmlFiles) {
try {
String[] command = {"java","Test",file, "10000"};
Process pr = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command); // run the command
input = new Scanner(new InputStreamReader(pr.getInputStream()));
String line=null;
ofw=new FileWriter(file"_out.txt");
out=new PrintWriter(ofw);
while(input.hasNextLine()) {
line=input.nextLine();
System.out.println(line);
if(line.matches("[0-9.\\s]*")) { // I included this as I didn't want the '@^' character - but still, it is being produced.
out.println(line);
out.flush();
String[] str = line.split(" ");
if(!line.equals("Badly formatted XML file")){
if((Float.parseFloat(str[0]) >= 196)) //this is the limit upto which the process has to be run
pr.destroy();
else
continue;
out.close();
int exitVal = pr.waitFor();
System.out.println("Exited with error code "+exitVal);
} catch(Exception e) {
System.out.println(e.toString());
e.printStackTrace();
}