Making an ASCII file into a text file

Question

Hi-
I am trying to read the lines of an ASCII file as Strings and write them to a new text file. Eventually I will modify the info in the lines, but for now I'm just trying to get the flow from one file to another. I can't figure out how to write a String to a new file. Below is the code that I've written so far, followed by the error that i get when I run it (it compiles fine). One problem I see is that FileWriters are made to write characters, but I want to write Strings to a new file. How do I get around this?
import java.io.*;
import java.lang.*;
import java.util.*;
class Delimiter {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
try {
File inputFile=new File("test.asc");
File outputFile=new File(test.txt");
BufferedReader in=new BufferedReader(new FileReader(inputFile));
BufferedWriter out=new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(outputFile));
String line=" ";
while (line != null) {
line=in.readLine();
out.write(line);
out.newLine();
in.close();
out.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
ERROR:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.io.Writer.write(Unknown Source)
at Delimiter.main(Delimiter.java:23)

Answer 1

sorry, I responded too quickly. I put out.write(null);
just before the in.close(); statement and got an error
saying that command is ambiguous b/c write() could
belong to multiple classes. did you mean that I should
put it in the while loop?I didn't mean for you to put
out.write(null);
in your code. I meant to point out that when 'line' is null, the problem is that you are passing a null to the out.write() method. That is bad. Don't do that. Use the above. It will test for null before doing the write().