File I/O

Kotlin has inherited Java's fidgety (but very flexible) way of doing I/O, but with some simplifying extra features. We won't get into all of it here, so for starters, this is how to iterate through all the lines of a file (you'll need import java.io.File):

File("data.txt").forEachLine { println(it) }

The default encoding is UTF-8, but you can specify it if you need something else:

File("data.txt").forEachLine(Charsets.UTF_16) { println(it) }

Note that the trailing newline of each line is stripped. You can also call readLines() on a file object to get a list of all the lines, or useLines() to supply a function that will be called on every line. If you simply want the entire file contents as one string or byte array, call readText() or readBytes(), respectively.

Note that while File() does create a "file object", it doesn't actually open the file - the file object is just a reference to the file path; opening the file is a separate action. The preceding functions open and close the file automatically, whereas other functions separately open and close the file. For example, if you're parsing binary data and you don't want to read the entire file at once, you must create an input stream (for binary data) or an input stream reader (for strings) - the example below will read 16 bytes:

val stream = File("data.txt").inputStream()
val bytes = ByteArray(16)
stream.read(bytes)
stream.close()
println(bytes)

It's important to close a stream when you're done with it; otherwise, your program will leak a file handle. See the next section for how do do this nicely.

If you've got one string that you want to write to a file, overwriting the existing contents if the file already exists, do this (again, UTF-8 is the default encoding):

File("data.txt").writeText("Hello world!")

If you want to write strings gradually, you need to create an OutputStreamWriter by calling writer() on the file object. You can write binary data to a file by calling outputStream() on a file object and use the resulting OutputStream to write bytes.

If you need a fancier way of reading or writing file data, you have access to the full Java suite of I/O classes - in particular, Scanner, which can parse numbers and other data types from files or other streams, and BufferedReader (which is good for efficient reading of large amounts of data), which you can obtain by calling bufferedReader() on a file or stream. See any Java tutorial for how to use these.

This material was written by Aasmund Eldhuset; it is owned by Khan Academy and is licensed for use under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. Please note that this is not a part of Khan Academy's official product offering.