Since compressing and archiving old log file is an essential housekeeping job in any Java application environment, a Java programmer should know how to compress files in .zip format and then how to read them programmatically if required. The JDK provides full support to create and read ZIP files in Java. There is a separate package java.util.zip to hold all classes related zipping and unzipping files and streams. In this series of article, you will learn how to use those classes e.g. ZipFile, ZipEntry, ZipInputStream, and ZipOutputStream etc. This is the second article about how to work with compressed archives in Java e.g. .zip files. In the last article, I have shown you how to read ZIP archives in Java and today, I'll teach you how to compress files in the ZIP file format by yourself using a Java program. You will compress a bunch of text file to create a .zip file by using JDK's ZIP file support classes.
3 ways to Copy a File From One Directory to Another in Java
Even though Java is considered one of the best feature-rich programming language, until Java 7, It didn't have any method to copy a file from one directory to another directory. It did have the java.io.File class, which provides a method to check if a file exists or not and methods for several other file operations but it lacks support for copying file from one folder to another. It was easy to write your own routine to copy a file using FileInputStream or FileChannel, most developers prefer to use Apache Commons IO library; which is not a bad idea at all. Even Joshua Bloch (author of several Java classes in JDK, including Java Collection Framework) advise using libraries instead of reinventing wheels in must read Effective Java book. The Apache Commons IO library provides a class called FileUtils, which contains several file utility methods including one for copying file from one directory to another.
How to read a text file as String in Java
There was no easy way to read a text file as String in Java until JDK 7, which released NIO 2. This API now provides a couple of utility methods which you can use to read entire file as String e.g. Files.readAllBytes() returns a byte array of the entire text file. You can convert that byte array to String to have a whole text file as String inside your Java program. If you need all lines of files as List of String e.g. into an ArrayList, you can use Files.readAllLines() method. This return a List of String, where each String represents a single line of the file. Prior to these API changes, I used to use the BufferedReader and StringBuilder to read the entire text file as String. You iterate through the file, reading one line at a time using readLine() method and appending them into a StringBuilder until you reach the end of the file. You can still use this method if you are running on Java SE 6 or lower version.
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