Quick question using FileWriter

Question

Hi all!
I have a file f that I wish to write to my C:\testarea directory, I was just wondering how I accomplish this using FileWriter. This is what I have so far:
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("C:\\testarea"));But then how can I pass my file f to the writer to write it. Alternatively I could have done:
BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(f));But then how can I specify where I want it to write to?
Many thanks for your help in advance!

Answer 1

Remember that directories are files, too. If C:\testarea is a directory, then executing the following expression:
new FileWriter("C:\\testarea")Causes the following runtime exception:
Exception in thread "main" java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\testarea (Access is denied)
The FileNotFound- part is misleading: the error is "Access is denied": you typically don't have write
access to a directory. The above writer is attempting to write to the directory file, versus writing to a given
file in that directory.
I think you also have some basic misunderstandings with regard to relative paths. If you create a file object::
File f = new File("file.txt");Well, as the File API states:
By default the classes in the java.io package always resolve relative pathnames against the current user
directory. This directory is named by the system property user.dir, and is typically the directory in which the
Java virtual machine was invoked.
The following program demonstrates this:
import java.io.*;
public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        File f = new File("file.txt");
        System.out.println("user.dir = " + System.getProperty("user.dir"));
        System.out.println("path = " + f.getAbsolutePath());
}So how to you write to file file.txt in directory c:\testarea? In any of the following ways:
String dirPath = "C:\\testarea";
String filename = "file.txt";
String path = dirPath + File.pathSeparator + filename;
File dir = new File(dirPath);
File f1 = new File(dir, filename);
File f2 = new File(path);
File f3 = new File(dirPath, filename);
BufferedWriter w = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(f1_or_f2_or_f3));
BufferedWriter anotherw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(path));