Java writing a list of strings to a file, but the file is empty

Jeremy :

I have found this question in other languages, but have yet to find a solution to this issue in a java application.

I have a large .txt file with millions of records. Each record is /n delimited. Basically it is a single column of data from a table. The goal is to read the data from the input file and partition it. Then write the partitioned data to a new file. For example, a file with 2 million records will become 200 files with 10,000 records each (with the last file containing <10,000.)

I am successfully reading and partitioning the data. I am successfully creating the first file and it is being named properly.

The problem is only 1 file is created and it is empty. The code as is compiles and runs without errors or exceptions.

My code is below:

    import java.io.BufferedReader;
    import java.io.BufferedWriter;
    import java.io.FileReader;
    import java.io.FileWriter;
    import java.io.IOException;
    import java.io.StringWriter;
    import java.util.ArrayList;
    import java.util.Collection;
    import java.util.List;
    import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicInteger;
    import java.util.stream.Collectors;

    public class ChunkTextFile {

    private static final String inputFilename = "inputFile.txt";

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        BufferedReader reader = null;

        BufferedWriter fileWriter = null;

        BufferedWriter lineWriter = null;

        StringWriter stringWriter = null;

        // Create an ArrayList object to hold the lines of input file

        List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();

        try {
            // Creating BufferedReader object to read the input file

            reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("src" + "//" + inputFilename));

            // Reading all the lines of input file one by one and adding them into ArrayList
            String currentLine = reader.readLine();

            while (currentLine != null) {
                lines.add(currentLine);

                currentLine = reader.readLine();

            }
            // End of file read.

           //Partition ArrayList into a collection of smaller Lists<String>
            final AtomicInteger counter = new AtomicInteger(0);
            final int size = 10000;

            Collection<List<String>> partitioned = lines.stream()
                    .collect(Collectors.groupingBy(it -> counter.getAndIncrement() / size)).values();

            //Printing partitions. Each partition will be written to a file.
            //Testing confirms the partitioning works correctly.
            partitioned.forEach(System.out::println);

            //Iterate through the Collections and create a file for List<String> object.
            //Testing confirms that multiple files are created and properly named.
            Integer count = 0;
            for (List<String> chunks : partitioned) {
                // Prepare new incremented file name.
                String outputFile = "batched_items_file_";
                String txt = ".txt";
                count++;


                String filename = outputFile + count + txt;

                // Write file to directory.
                fileWriter = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("src" + "//" + outputFile));
                fileWriter = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(filename));

                //Iterate through the List of Strings and write each String to the file.
                //Writing is not successful. Only 1 file is created and it is empty.
                for (String chunk : chunks) {
                    stringWriter = new StringWriter();
                    lineWriter = new BufferedWriter(stringWriter);
                    // Prepare list of strings to be written to new file.
                    // Write each item number to file.
                    lineWriter.write(chunk);
                    lineWriter.flush();
                }
                lineWriter.close(); // <- flush the BufferedWriter

                fileWriter.close();
            }

        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            // Closing the resources
            System.out.println("Finished");

            try {
                if (reader != null) {
                    reader.close();
                }

                if (fileWriter != null) {
                    fileWriter.close();
                }

                if (stringWriter != null) {
                    stringWriter.close();
                }
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
}

Input file example:

Thank you in advance.

André Paris :

You don't need all those extra writers in your for and the writer supposed to write (fileWriter) to the file is not being called. Replace your for by this one:

for (String chunk : chunks) {
    fileWriter.write(chunk);
}

Tip: Just call fileWriter.close() once inside the finally block. The close method will automatically flush the writer for you (there's no need to call fileWriter.flush()).

Java writing a list of strings to a file, but the file is empty

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