Is there a way I can store pictures/sounds into my Jar file?

[Paul Carter]

I am trying to write a very basic game in Java and would like to store and fetch the images and sounds I play/show from the jar file itself instead of having to distribute the sounds/images in a separate folder.

What's the easiest/best way to acheive this?

[Jan Cumps]

It' possible.
You can place them in a jar, and load them later with ClassLoader.getResource().

The jar needs to be in your classpath.

Regards, Jan

[Justin Fox]

jan, you said the jar must be in your classpath..

like in the eviromental variables or is there some classpath that
you code?

Justin

[Deepak Bala]

You can load images with URLConnection and load sounds with the JarEntry class and acquire an input stream. I made a post about sound files and jars a while back. I think it was in the java in general intermediate forum. It has a small code fragment that loads files using JarEntry

[Jesper de Jong]

Yes, the JAR needs to be in the classpath, but if the Java program itself (the game Paul is talking about) is in the same JAR file, then it will already be in the classpath. So there's nothing special you have to do with the classpath.

The easiest way to access files like images etc. that are inside a JAR is by doing something like this:

// In this example, image.jpg must be in the same folder inside the JAR file as the class file
InputStream in = getClass().getResourceAsStream("image.jpg");
 
// Use your favourite API (for example ImageIO) to load the image from the input stream
BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(in);
 
// Close the stream
in.close();

The standard Java library also contains classes to work with JAR files that John is hinting at in the package java.util.jar, but the method above is the easiest way.

[Jan Cumps]

Originally posted by Justin Fox:
jan, you said the jar must be in your classpath..

like in the environmental variables or is there some classpath that
you code?

Justin

Either in the environment variable, or passed to java command line:

java -cp path/to/mylibrary.jar .....

Regards, Jan

[Paul Carter]

FileInputStream in = getClass().getResourceAsStream("image.jpg");
BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(in);
in.close();

Cheers guys, but on the first line I get an error:
Incompatible Types
found : java.io.InputStream
required: java.io.FileInputStream
FileInputStream in = getClass().getResourceAsStream("image.jpg");

Do I use an InputStream instead?

[Jan Cumps]

Do I use an InputStream instead?

Yes.

Regards, Jan