File Input Output in Scala

Welcome to the File Input Output in Scala page! Here, you'll find the source code for this program as well as a description of how the program works.

Current Solution

import scala.io.Source
import java.io.{FileNotFoundException, IOException, File, FileOutputStream, PrintWriter}

object FileInputOutput {
  // reading file then write to stdout
  // write exception when fail
  def readFromFile(filename: String) {
    try {
      val buffer = Source.fromFile(filename)
      val lines = buffer.getLines

      lines.foreach(println)
      buffer.close
    } catch {
      case e: FileNotFoundException => println(s"File ${filename} does not exist.")
      case e: IOException => println(s"I/O Exception when reading from ${filename}.")
      case e: Throwable => println(s"Error ${e.getMessage} when reading from ${filename}.")
    }
  }

  // write to file
  // stdout exception when fail
  def writeToFile(filename: String, contents: String) {
    try {
      val writer = new PrintWriter(new File(filename))
      writer.write(contents)
      writer.close
    } catch {
      case e: FileNotFoundException => println(s"Cannot write into file ${filename}.")
      case e: Throwable => println(s"Error ${e.getMessage} when writing to file ${filename}.")
    }
  }

  def main(args: Array[String]) {
    // write succesfully
    writeToFile("output.txt", "I am a string.\nI am also a string.\nScala is fun!\n")

    // read successfully
    readFromFile("output.txt")
  }
}

File Input Output in Scala was written by:

• rzuckerm

If you see anything you'd like to change or update, please consider contributing.

How to Implement the Solution

First of all let's look at the read / write functions as a whole, and their usages.

Read from a file

In many real world scenario, your program usually takes one of the two approaches when dealing with undeterministic I/O (also called side-effects): fail loudly or fail silently.

We want to fail loudly, i.e. throw exception, stop execution flow or output error as results, when the I/O is critical for the program to proceed.

  // reading file then write to stdout
  // write exception when fail
  def readFromFile(filename: String) {
    try {
      val buffer = Source.fromFile(filename)
      val lines = buffer.getLines

      lines.foreach(println)
      buffer.close
    } catch {
      case e: FileNotFoundException => println(s"File ${filename} does not exist.")
      case e: IOException => println(s"I/O Exception when reading from ${filename}.")
      case e: Throwable => println(s"Error ${e.getMessage} when reading from ${filename}.")
    }
  }

Similar to many other language, scala.io.Source provides the ability to get a file into a buffer-like instance, in our case BufferedSource, using fromFile. Source is built-in with Java exceptions to let us know what causes the failure in opening / reading the file.

Since we are dealing with a text file, we can simply use getLines to convert BufferedSource to a Iterator[String]. We can also convert Iterator[String] to a List[String] or Array[String] using .toList and .toArray respectively.

Iterator interface allows us to traverse each line, using foreach. The syntactic sugar lines.foreach(println) you see here is short-hand for:

lines.foreach(line => println(line))

or

for (line <- lines) {
  println(line)
}

After extracting the buffer, we close it with buffer.close.

catch block here demonstrate Scala's pattern matching feature. By default, all exceptions can be caught as a Throwable. However we have the option to deal with specific exception (FileNotFoundException or IOException) separately.

Usage is simple:

readFromFile("output.txt")

Write to a file

Similar pattern for writing to files. Unlike read, which is usually at the beginning of some logic and having the input type determined gains us benefits, write is usually a void function with no return types, and called at the end of execution (result, log, etc.).

// write to file
// stdout exception when fail
def writeToFile(filename: String, contents: String) {
  try {
    val writer = new PrintWriter(new File(filename))
    writer.write(contents)
    writer.close
  } catch {
    case e: FileNotFoundException => println(s"Cannot write into file ${filename}.")
    case e: Throwable => println(s"Error ${e.getMessage} when writing to file ${filename}.")
  }
}

Usage is straightforward, simply call the function:

```scala
writeToFile("output.txt", "I am a string.\nI am also a string.\nScala is fun!\n")

How to Run the Solution

The source requires standard scala compiler and runtime: scalac and scala. Before running the program, make sure the files are in the same directory as the compiled .class.

$ scalac FileInputOutput.scala
$ scala FileInputOutput