Read and write a String from text file

Question

I need to read and write data to/from a text file, but I haven\'t been able to figure out how.

I found this sample code in the Swift\'s iBook, but I still don\'t kno

Answer 1

In the function example, (read|write)DocumentsFromFile(...) having some function wrappers certainly seems to makes sense since everything in OSx and iOS seems to need three or four major classes instantiated and a bunch of properties, configured, linked, instantiated, and set, just to write "Hi" to a file, in 182 countries.

However, these examples aren't complete enough to use in a real program. The write function does not report any errors creating or writing to the file. On the read, I don't think it's a good idea to return an error that the file doesn't exist as the string that is supposed to contain the data that was read. You would want to know that it failed and why, through some notification mechanism, like an exception. Then, you can write some code that outputs what the problem is and allows the user to correct it, or "correctly" breaks the program at that point.

You would not want to just return a string with an "Error file does not exist" in it. Then, you would have to look for the error in the string from calling function each time and handle it there. You also possibly couldn't really tell if the error string was actually read from an actual file, or if it was produced from your code.

You can't even call the read like this in swift 2.2 and Xcode 7.3 because NSString(contentsOfFile...) throws an exception. It is a compile time error if you do not have any code to catch it and do something with it, like print it to stdout, or better, an error popup window, or stderr. I have heard that Apple is moving away from try catch and exceptions, but it's going to be a long move and it's not possible to write code without this. I don't know where the &error argument comes from, perhaps an older version, but NSString.writeTo[File|URL] does not currently have an NSError argument. They are defined like this in NSString.h :

public func writeToURL(url: NSURL, atomically useAuxiliaryFile: Bool, encoding enc: UInt) throws
public func writeToFile(path: String, atomically useAuxiliaryFile: Bool, encoding enc: UInt) throws
public convenience init(contentsOfURL url: NSURL, encoding enc: UInt) throws
public convenience init(contentsOfFile path: String, encoding enc: UInt) throws

Also, the file not existing is just one of a number of potential problems your program might have reading a file, such as a permissions problem, the file size, or numerous other issues that you would not even want to try to code a handler for each one of them. It's best to just assume it's all correct and catch and print, or handle, an exception if something goes amiss, besides, at this point, you don't really have a choice anyway.

Here are my rewrites :

func writeToDocumentsFile(fileName:String,value:String) {

    let documentsPath = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(.DocumentDirectory, .UserDomainMask, true)[0] as NSString!
    let path = documentsPath.stringByAppendingPathComponent(fileName)

    do {
        try value.writeToFile(path, atomically: true, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)
    } catch let error as NSError {
        print("ERROR : writing to file \(path) : \(error.localizedDescription)")
    }

}

func readFromDocumentsFile(fileName:String) -> String {

    let documentsPath = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(.DocumentDirectory, .UserDomainMask, true)[0] as NSString
    let path = documentsPath.stringByAppendingPathComponent(fileName)

    var readText : String = ""

    do {
        try readText = NSString(contentsOfFile: path, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding) as String
    }
    catch let error as NSError {
        print("ERROR : reading from file \(fileName) : \(error.localizedDescription)")
    }
    return readText
}