Does Not Write To A File

[JiaPei Jen]

I have this little program (shown below). The program gives me the expected output and I can print the output to the console
System.out.println(result);
I also want to write the output to a file. However, the program does not write anything to the file I specified. I got a blank file.
What mistake did I make?

import java.net.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.io.*;
public class URLConnectionReader {
   public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
      File fout = new File("c:/javaprj/WhoIs.txt");
      URLConnection wc = null;
      try {
         URL whois = new URL("http", "www.netsol.com", 
 "/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=yahoo.com&SearchType=do&STRING2.x=32&STRING2.y=10");
         // opens a connection to a URL
         wc = whois.openConnection();
      }
      // new URL() failed 
      catch(MalformedURLException e) {
         System.out.println("The URL is malformed!");
      }     
      // openConnection() failed
      catch(IOException e) {
         System.out.println("Connection cannot be established!");
      }               
      // get an input stream from the connection
      BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                          new InputStreamReader(
                             wc.getInputStream)));
      String inputLine;
      int count = 0;
      boolean flag = false;
      try {
         while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
            count++;
            if (flag) {
               System.out.println("line" + count + " is what I am looking for");
               flag = false;
            } 
            //pattern in the source file
            String expression = "Administrative Contact";
            //Create a pattern to find a match 
            Pattern p = Pattern.compile(expression);
            //To find a match in the source file
            Matcher m = p.matcher(inputLine);
            if (m.find()) {
               flag = true;
               BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(
                     new OutputStreamWriter(
                     new FileOutputStream(fout)));
               String result = m.group();
               System.out.println(result);
               out.write(result);
            }
         }
      }
      catch(IOException e) {System.out.println("Error occurred while reading!");}
      //close the stream
      finally {
         try {
             in.close();
         }
         catch(IOException e){System.out.println("closing file exception");}
      }
   }
}

[ December 31, 2002: Message edited by: JiaPei Jen ]
[ December 31, 2002: Message edited by: JiaPei Jen ]
[ December 31, 2002: Message edited by: JiaPei Jen ]

[Avi Abrami]

Hi Jen,
Assuming that you are executing your java class on a Windows machine, the only mistake I saw in your code was the name of the file you are trying to write to. The correct line of code should be:

File fout = new File("c:\\javaprj\\WhoIs.txt");

Hope this helps you.
Good Luck,
Avi.

[Blake Minghelli]

I think you need to flush your output stream before you are finished, otherwise the buffered bytes are not written.

[Jim Yingst]

Closing the output file when you're done with it would be a good idea - that will also flush it. But I don't think that's the biggest problem here. You're creating a new FileOutputStream each time you find a match to the pattern "Administrative Contact". Because you use the constructor new FileOutputStream(File), the new stream will overwrite any previous file, effectively replacing it with a new file that contains only the most recent information. To avoid this, you have two options:
(1) Use the constructor new FileOutputStream(File, boolean) instead, setting the second argument to true in order to append rather than overwrite. E.g. "new FileOutputStream(fout, true)".
(2) Create the FileOutputStream outside the loop, so it just happens once, and each time out.write() is called inside the loop it's appended to the same file. Then close the stream once after the loop is completed.
The second method is probably what you want here. Note that it's also possible to do a number of other things before the loop, such as compiling the Pattern (since it's always the same, each time through the loop).
Also, are you sure that the pattern is even being found in the data you're looking at? Is the line

               System.out.println(result);

causing something to be printed? You may want to modify it a bit to give it a more distinctive label to be sure:

               System.out.println("Match found - result is: " + result);

[gautham kasinath]

flush the stream after every write operation..
out.write(what-ever);
out.flush();
the when you are closing the inputstream object close the out too.
If you do not close or flush, the data will be only in the stream, but not written to disk.
Regds
Lupo