BufferedWriter and incorrect data...

[Pat Peg]

I create a file with BufferWriter and use 'myFile.write(small);' where small is an int of value 20000. when I do a BufferedReader on the same file I read back 63. If I increment my writes the file output increments although at some point soon the actual file is containing single character values and is moving up the ascii table(so that if I go and check my actual output.txt file I see'?', 'A', 'B','C', etc.) I guess my question is a very simple, how do I write and read an int value in files?

Thanks

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

The single argument write() takes a single character as an argument; if you pass an int, it's truncated to the low 16 bits and interpreted as a character, as you've observed. To write a human-readable number, you have to (one way or another) convert it to a human-readable String and print that String. One way to do it is with the PrintWriter class, which will format and print many kinds of numbers and other values automatically.

PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("myfile.txt")), true);
pw.println(20000);
pw.close();

This will create a file containing the characters '2', '0', '0', '0', '0', followed by the end-of-line sequence for your platform.