Reading Objects until End of File in java

Question

I'm trying to write a program where the user can: 1) Add a person to the contact (name, phone, email), 2) Remove a person from the contacts, 3) Read all from contact.

The Way I'm doing this is I'm asking for the user for their choice and respectively does whatever. For writing, I simply write an object to the file. For removing, I think I'll be asking the user for "last name" which will be used as the KEY (since I'm using a TreeMap)and will remove the value (object) at the key.

So I'm having a problem with reading here. I'm trying to read the object like so:

public void readContact()
{
  TreeMap<String, Contact> contactMap = new TreeMap<String, Contact>();
  try 
  {
    ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(
                                                   new FileInputStream(file)));

    while( in.available() > 0 ) //This line does NOT read  
    {
      Contact c = (Contact)in.readObject();
      contactMap.put(c.getLastName(), c);           
    }

    for(Map.Entry contact : contactMap.entrySet() ) 
    {
      Contact con = contactMap.get( contact.getKey() );
      System.out.println( con.getLastName() + ", " + con.getFirstName() + ": " + con.getPhoneNumber() + "\t" + con.getEmail());
    }
  }
  catch(Exception e)
  {
    System.out.println("Exception caught");
  } 
}

Please do not suggest doing something like while(true) until I get the EOFException because:

1. that isn't what exception handling is for I believe
2. I still have more things to do after this so I can't have the program terminating'

Answer 1

Please do not suggest doing something like while(true) until I get the EOFException

That is exactly what I suggest. When you are searching for answers it is counter-productive to circumscribe the solution space according to arbitrary criteria like this.

because:

that isn't what exception handling is for I believe

When an API that you are calling throws an exception, as this one does, you don't have any choice but to catch it. Whatever you may think about 'what exception handling is for', you are subject to what the designers of the API thought when they designed the API.

I still have more things to do after this so I can't have the program terminating'

So don't terminate it. Catch EOFException, close the input, and break out of the loop.

I have seen more costly programming time wasted over 'what exception handling is for' than I can really credit.