Write Java objects to file

Question

Is it possible to write objects in Java to a binary file? The objects I want to write would be 2 arrays of String objects. The reason I want to do this is to save persistent data. If there is some easier way to do this let me know.

Answer 1

You could

1. Serialize the Arrays, or a class that contains the arrays.
2. Write the arrays as two lines in a formatted way, such as JSON,XML or CSV.

Here is some code for the first one (You could replace the Queue with an array) Serialize

public static void main(String args[]) {
  String[][] theData = new String[2][1];

  theData[0][0] = ("r0 c1");
  theData[1][0] = ("r1 c1");
  System.out.println(theData.toString());

  // serialize the Queue
  System.out.println("serializing theData");
  try {
      FileOutputStream fout = new FileOutputStream("thedata.dat");
      ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(fout);
      oos.writeObject(theData);
      oos.close();
      }
   catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); }
}

Deserialize

public static void main(String args[]) {
   String[][] theData;

   // unserialize the Queue
   System.out.println("unserializing theQueue");
   try {
    FileInputStream fin = new FileInputStream("thedata.dat");
    ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(fin);
    theData = (Queue) ois.readObject();
    ois.close();
    }
   catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); }

   System.out.println(theData.toString());     
}

The second one is more complicated, but has the benefit of being human as well as readable by other languages.

Read and Write as XML

import java.beans.XMLEncoder;
import java.beans.XMLDecoder;
import java.io.*;

public class XMLSerializer {
    public static void write(String[][] f, String filename) throws Exception{
        XMLEncoder encoder =
           new XMLEncoder(
              new BufferedOutputStream(
                new FileOutputStream(filename)));
        encoder.writeObject(f);
        encoder.close();
    }

    public static String[][] read(String filename) throws Exception {
        XMLDecoder decoder =
            new XMLDecoder(new BufferedInputStream(
                new FileInputStream(filename)));
        String[][] o = (String[][])decoder.readObject();
        decoder.close();
        return o;
    }
}

To and From JSON

Google has a good library to convert to and from JSON at http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/ You could simply write your object to JSOn and then write it to file. To read do the opposite.