Lab 2: File Input and Output

Description

This lab introduces how to handle files as both input and output. We’re coming back to
Tracery (which you implemented in Lab 1) with this assignment but instead of always
reading the grammar from a file and writing the expanded grammar to the command
line, we will also be able to read a grammar from the command line and write the
expanded grammar to a file. To do this, you’ll be learning about some of the IO
(input/output) classes in Java, and how the Java concept of a Stream provides an
abstraction layer above files and console I/O.
You will be doing the following:
● Import the correct IO packages from the Standard Library
● Process command line arguments that determine whether the program is
reading/writing from the console (command line) or from a file
● Load a grammar either from the console or from a file, based on the
arguments the program was given
● Write the expanded grammar to either the command line or a file, based
on the arguments the program was given
Open the file TraceryRecursion.java that came with the lab. This is where you’ll
make all your changes. Every place in the file where you’re supposed to make a change
is marked with a comment labeled To Do.
Importing packages in Java
Try compiling the code we’ve given you. If you haven’t made any changes it’ll tell you it
can’t find the following symbols:
● class Hashtable
● class PrintStream
● class InputStream
But in Lab 1 we were able to use a Hashtable, so what’s different? The problem is that
we’re trying to use something from the Java Standard Library without telling Java that
we are. To tell Java that we’re using something from the standard library, you use the
import statement. In Lab 1 we had already included the correct imports for you. For lab
2 the compiler is telling you that you need to import these three classes in order to use
them.
As an example of importing a class, to import Hashtable from the standard library so
you can use it, you would put this statement at the beginning of your program:
import java.util.Hashtable
The java.util part is the package (a collection of classes) that Hashtable belongs to.
To figure out the package of a class you want to import from the standard library, you
look at its documentation page. The documentation for Java’s Hashtable is here. In
addition to all the info about where it is in the type hierarchy and its accessible fields
and methods, the documentation page says what package the class is part of at the top
of the page right above the class name.
To import PrintStream and InputStream you can look up the package they belong to
at their respective documentation pages (here and here). Another trick to know about,
though you don’t really need to use it in this lab, is how to import a bunch of classes
from the same package at once. To import all of the classes from a package, you can
use statement:
import .*
Command line arguments
This program can take the following command line arguments:
-in -out

The “-in” and “-out” part of the arguments allow us to specify the input and output
file arguments in either order. Below are described the different valid combinations of
arguments.
$ java TraceryRecursion
This reads the grammar from the console and writes the expanded grammar to the
console. Reading from the console is called standard in and writing to the console is
called standard out. Standard in is represented by the InputStream object stored in
System.in, while standard out is represented by the PrintStream object stored in
System.out. We will be reading from the console using pipes and the command cat (in
unix systems like Mac OS and Linux and gitbash for Windows). There is more about this
below.
$ java TraceryRecursion -in grammar-story.txt
This reads a grammar from file grammar-story.txt and writes to standard out. This
was the behavior you implemented in Lab 1.
$ java TraceryRecursion -out grammar-out.txt
This reads grammar from standard in and writes the expanded grammar to the text file
grammar-out.txt.
$ java TraceryRecursion -out grammar-out.txt -in grammar-story.txt
This reads a grammar from from file grammar-story.txt and writes the expanded
grammar to file grammar-out.txt. Note that since our command line arguments
specify the input and output file with -in and -out you can put the arguments in either
order (that is -out first like the example above, or -in first).Your code doesn’t need to
handle bad command line arguments. Since -in and -out are what tell the program to
use files, junk arguments will default the program to reading from standard in and
writing to standard out.
Processing command line arguments
We use the command line arguments to figure out where we’re reading the grammar
from and where we’re writing the grammar to. This is done with two helper functions that
you need to write:
public static InputStream getInputStream(String[] args);
public static PrintStream getOutputStream(String[] args);
There are comments marked with To Do in the file to remind you to define these
methods. You’ll be calling these methods in main, passing them the command line
arguments, in order to determine the InputStream and PrintStream to use.
The nice thing about these methods is that they abstract away whether you’re
reading/writing from standard IO or a file. The rest of the code can just read from the
returned InputStream and write to the returned OutputStream without having to know
or care whether its a file or the console.
To understand this, here’s a bit more information about how Java abstracts input and
output. You’ll notice that getInputStream() returns an InputStream which is an
abstract class (an abstract class, like an interface, can’t be directly instantiated as
an object). This means you will actually be returning a subclass of InputStream, where
which subclass depends on whether it’s the console or a file. If reading from a file, you’ll
be returning something called a FileInputStream. The diagram below shows where it
sits in the class hierarchy for IO.
A FileInputStream is the subclass of InputStream for reading from a File. A File is
Java’s representation of a file in the computer’s file system. The field System.in stores
an InputStream for standard input.
To return the correct input location you’ll:
● Look for a “-in” in args[]
● If there is an “-in” then you’ll make a new FileInputStream that will
take a new File named whatever is in args[] in the index after the
location you found “-in”. Return the FileInputStream.
● Otherwise return System.in which is also an InputStream
You can assume that there will be 0, 2 or 4 command line arguments.
Now since we’re dealing with user input and we don’t know what exactly is in the folder
with our program (from the program’s point of view), we want to handle the possibility
that the input file we were told to open doesn’t exist. We’ll want to use a try-catch
block to catch a FileNotFoundException within getInputStream(). If you catch the
exception, print the error message “Input grammar file does not exist.” and
return System.in (as if no -in argument was specified).
Our function getOutputStream() is very similar to getInputStream() but instead of
returning an InputStream we’re returning a PrintStream (System.out is a
PrintStream).
To return the correct output location you’ll:
● Look for a “-out” in args[]
● If there is a “-out” then you’ll make a new PrintStream that will take a
new File named whatever is in args[] in the index after the location you
found “-out”. Return the PrintStream
● Otherwise return System.out which is also a PrintStream
As above, you’ll want to catch a FileNotFoundException, print the error message
“Output file can not be created.”, and return System.out (as if no -out
argument was specified).
Piping on the command line
Another part of this lab is giving you practice using pipes on the command line to use
the standard output of one program as the standard input of another. For our purposes
we’ll be using pipes to pipe the contents of a file into TraceryRecursion, but in general
it’s possible to hook lots of programs together on the command line using pipes. The
general form of using pipes looks like | where the | character is the pipe. The line above would takes the standard output of (which would normally just print to the console) and feeds it into the
standard input of (which would normally read interactively from the
console).
To feed a file into the standard input of TraceryRecursion, we’ll use the the unix
command cat (short for concatenate). This command simply reads a file and writes the
content to standard out. For example, if we type:
cat grammar-story.txt
this will print out the file contents to the console:
animal:cat,emu,okapi
Emotion:happy,sad,elated,curious,sleepy
Color:red,green,blue
Name:emily,luis,otavio,anna,charlie
character:#name# the #adjective# #animal#
place:school,the beach,the zoo,Burning Man
adjective:#color#,#emotion#,
origin:once #character# and #character# went to #place#
To take this output and feed it into TraceryRecursion we can pipe the output of cat
into TraceryRecursion:
cat grammar-story.txt | java TraceryRecursion
More generally this looks like:
cat | java TraceryRecursion
Try running TraceryRecursion without a -out argument using pipes to feed grammar
files into TraceryRecursion.
Loading the grammar
For this lab, the loadGrammar() function will be very similar to what it was in Lab 1 with
one major difference: instead of giving it a string as an argument we’re passing it
the InputStream we returned from getInputStream().
We’re going to use an instance of BufferedReader to read from this InputStream.
The main reason for using this class instead of the raw InputStream is for the function
readLine() which allows us to read strings that correspond to a line of the file,
automatically handling the fact that different operating systems using different
characters to indicate the end of a line. You can read more about BufferedReaders
here. To make a new BufferedReader you need to give it a new InputStreamReader
which requires an InputStream as part of its constructor. You can see the details of an
InputStreamReader here. So you’ll be creating a new BufferedReader from a new
InputStreamReader which is created from the InputStream.
Note: The constructor for BufferedReader wants an instance of the abstract class
Reader as the argument. An InputStreamReader is a subclass of Reader, which is
why this works.
We’ll use the readLine() method on BufferedReader to read each line of the
grammar and add it to the Hashtable. The loop where you’re calling readLine() will
have to know when to stop. Fortunately, it returns null when it gets to the end of the
stream, so we can use this to know when the loop should stop.
Specifying that loadGrammar() throws an exception
You’ve probably seen at least a few RuntimeExceptions being thrown in your
experience as a Java programmer. Among the most common are the
ArrayOutOfBoundsException (when you’re trying to access an index that isn’t in an
array) and a NullPointerException (when you try to access a field or method on a
reference variable that hasn’t been set equal to anything). These are unchecked
exceptions, and programmers don’t usually try to catch them.
The BufferedReader methods in loadGrammar() throw the checked exception
IOException. Since it’s checked, the compiler flags it as an error, requiring the
programmer to either catch the exception or declare that the method can throw the
exception. For example, to declare that main() can throw an IOException, you’d
change the signature to:
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
You’ll need to do this for loadGrammar(). When you declare that a method throws a
checked exception, the compiler is happy, because now it can check that anyone who
calls the method that can throw an exception either catches the exception or declares
that they throw the exception in turn.
Changes in main()
There are two things you’ll need to change in main():
● Calling the methods getInputStream() and getPrintStream() to get
the InputStream and PrintStream based on the arguments
● Changing the println() in main() to be called on the PrintStream that
getOutputStream() returned
Outputting the grammar
Unlike in Lab 1, the method outputGrammar() has two arguments. Like the previous
lab, the first one is the grammar we’re expanding. The second is the PrintStream
we’re going to print the grammar to. All we have to do here is to call println() on the
PrintStream argument rather than on standard output.
Example arguments and output
$ java TraceryRecursion -in grammar-story.txt -out output.txt
Running TraceryRecursion…
Set seed 1
The contents of output.txt are:
GRAMMAR:
adjective: “#color#”,”#emotion#”,
place: “school”,”the beach”,”the zoo”,”Burning Man”,
emotion: “happy”,”sad”,”elated”,”curious”,”sleepy”,
origin: “once #character# and #character# went to
#place#”,
color: “red”,”green”,”blue”,
name: “emily”,”luis”,”otavio”,”anna”,”charlie”,
character: “#name# the #adjective# #animal#”,
animal: “cat”,”emu”,”okapi”,
once otavio the blue emu and luis the curious emu went to school
once otavio the elated cat and charlie the blue emu went to school
once anna the elated okapi and charlie the sad okapi went to Burning
Man
once emily the happy okapi and otavio the red cat went to school
once otavio the blue cat and emily the sleepy okapi went to the beach
once luis the green cat and charlie the blue emu went to school
once otavio the red emu and otavio the red okapi went to the zoo
once charlie the green cat and luis the green okapi went to the zoo
once luis the red emu and emily the red cat went to school
once otavio the sad okapi and luis the happy emu went to school
Turning the code in
● Create a directory with the following name: _lab2 where you
replace with your actual student ID. For example, if your student
ID is 1234567, then the directory name is 1234567_lab2.
● Put a copy of your edited TraceryRecursion.java file in the directory.
● Compress the folder using zip. Zip is a compression utility available on mac, linux
and windows that can compress a directory into a single file. This should result in
a file named _lab2.zip (with replaced with your
real ID of course).
● Upload the zip file through the page for Lab 2 in canvas
(https://canvas.ucsc.edu/courses/12730/assignments/39627).
Helpful tips:
Packages:
● Overview of using package members:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/package/usepkgs.html
Try-Catch:
● Overview of catch blocks in Java:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/catch.html
● Throwables in Java:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions/throwing.html
I/O Streams
● Relationship of the various Input and Output Streams:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22563986/understanding-getinputstre
am-and-getoutputstream