How do I save a String to a text file using Java?

Question

In Java, I have text from a text field in a String variable called \"text\".

How can I save the contents of the \"text\" variable to a file?

Answer 1

import java.io.*;

private void stringToFile( String text, String fileName )
 {
 try
 {
    File file = new File( fileName );

    // if file doesnt exists, then create it 
    if ( ! file.exists( ) )
    {
        file.createNewFile( );
    }

    FileWriter fw = new FileWriter( file.getAbsoluteFile( ) );
    BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter( fw );
    bw.write( text );
    bw.close( );
    //System.out.println("Done writing to " + fileName); //For testing 
 }
 catch( IOException e )
 {
 System.out.println("Error: " + e);
 e.printStackTrace( );
 }
} //End method stringToFile

You can insert this method into your classes. If you are using this method in a class with a main method, change this class to static by adding the static key word. Either way you will need to import java.io.* to make it work otherwise File, FileWriter and BufferedWriter will not be recognized.

Answer 2

Basically the same answer as here, but easy to copy/paste, and it just works ;-)

  import java.io.FileWriter;

  public void saveToFile(String data, String filename) {
    try (
      FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(filename)) {
      fw.write(data);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
  }

Answer 3

It's better to close the writer/outputstream in a finally block, just in case something happen

finally{
   if(writer != null){
     try{
        writer.flush();
        writer.close();
     }
     catch(IOException ioe){
         ioe.printStackTrace();
     }
   }
}

Answer 4

My way is based on stream due to running on all Android versions and needs of fecthing resources such as URL/URI, any suggestion is welcome.

As far as concerned, streams (InputStream and OutputStream) transfer binary data, when developer goes to write a string to a stream, must first convert it to bytes, or in other words encode it.

public boolean writeStringToFile(File file, String string, Charset charset) {
    if (file == null) return false;
    if (string == null) return false;
    return writeBytesToFile(file, string.getBytes((charset == null) ? DEFAULT_CHARSET:charset));
}

public boolean writeBytesToFile(File file, byte[] data) {
    if (file == null) return false;
    if (data == null) return false;
    FileOutputStream fos;
    BufferedOutputStream bos;
    try {
        fos = new FileOutputStream(file);
        bos = new BufferedOutputStream(fos);
        bos.write(data, 0, data.length);
        bos.flush();
        bos.close();
        fos.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        Logger.e("!!! IOException");
        return false;
    }
    return true;
}

Answer 5

You could do this:

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

class WriteText
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {   
        try {
            String text = "Your sample content to save in a text file.";
            BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("sample.txt"));
            out.write(text);
            out.close();
        }
        catch (IOException e)
        {
            System.out.println("Exception ");       
        }

        return ;
    }
};

Answer 6

In case if you need create text file based on one single string:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

public class StringWriteSample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String text = "This is text to be saved in file";

        try {
            Files.write(Paths.get("my-file.txt"), text.getBytes());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}