How can I save information in an existing textfile in Java?

Question

I want to save information in a textfile I already created. At school we only learnt to create a new one and save information in it.

How can I acheive this?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

By default, if you create a FileOutputStream or FileWriter, it will just overwrite the existing text file - so if that's what you want to do, you're fine already.

If you want to append to a file, use the overload of the constructors for either of those types which takes a boolean parameter to indicate append/overwrite:

FileOutputStream output = new FileOutputStream("data.txt", true);

If you have been using FileWriter, by the way, I'd advise you to stop doing so - instead use FileOutputStream wrapped in an OutputStreamWriter. This allows you to specify the encoding you want to use, instead of always using the platform default encoding.

Answer 2

FileWriter fw = FileWriter(new File(pathToFile), true);  
fw.write(stringToWrite);