Reading in from File w/out path name

Question

Does anyone know why netbeans requires an entire path name to read from a file? I am trying to read from a file and I want the program to just look in the directory that the jar file is in to find the file to read from. I do not want the file to be IN the jar file, just inside that directory...

Answer 1

As I understand it, when your code runs, it does not run relative to the folder that the jar file that contains it exists in. If you want to know where the code is running from in order to use relative path instead of absolute path, put this in your code and examine the output it generates:
File file =new File("");
System.out.println( file.getAbsolutePath() );
Example: if the print out shows your code is running in:
c:/ dir1 /dir2 / dir3
and your file is in
c: / dir2 /dirN / myFile.txt
then your relative path would be:
../dirN/myFile.txt
where starting from c:/ dir1 /dir2 / dir3, ../ means go one folder level "up" (to c:/ dir2 ), and dirN/ means from there, go down into the folder dirN (which would be c: / dir2 /dirN )