Which is better - using String or File as parameter type for methods that take filenames [closed]

Answer 1

I would pass an java.io.InputStream - this makes the code easier to test and doesn't bind it to the file system.

This way your code ends up like:

public void normalizeData(InputStream in)
{
  ...
}

And calling it:

myObject.normalizeData(new FileInputStream(myFile));

Or

myObject.normalizeData(new FileInputStream("c:/myfile.txt"));

Or in a test

myObject.normalizeData(new ByteArrayInputStream("some test data".getBytes()));