In this post i am going to discuss about the End of File(EOF) exception.EOFexception extends IOException and is thrown while performing I/O operations.
This exception is usually thrown when the end of file (EOF) is reached unexpectedly while reading the input file.Note that,this exception will also be thrown if the input file contains no data in it.
I have explained this EOF exception with the following program.The following program tries to read the file "exam.txt" and prints its contents.When the reader has reached the end of the file i have thrown the EOF exception to indicate that the file has reached its end.
Program:
import java.io.*;
public class Example1
{
public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException
{
BufferedReader br=null;
try
{
File f=new File("E:/exam.txt");
FileReader reader = new FileReader(f);
br = new BufferedReader(reader);
String strcontent =null;
while(true)
{
if((strcontent=br.readLine()) != null)
{
System.out.println(strcontent);
}
else
{
throw new EOFException();
}
}
}
catch(FileNotFoundException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch(EOFException e1)
{
br.close();
System.out.println("The file has reached its end");
}
}
}
Thus in the above code the statement "throw new EOFException()" is used to explicily indicate the end of the file and perform the necessary actions rather than letting jvm to deal with it.
In the above program if you do not include the statement
throw new EOFException then it will not get terminated.
Sometimes this exception may occur due to an error in the input file.For eg. if the header of the file indicates that the content length of the file is 1000 characters but if you encounter the EOF character after reading some 200 characters.In this situation EOFException can be used to deal with it.
NOTE:
1.When we use Scanner object to read from a file then java.util.NoSuchElementException is thrown if the end of file (EOF) is reached.
2.If we use BufferedReader object to read from a file then no exception will be thrown upon reaching the end of the file.
3. If we use DataInputStream object to read from a file then this
EOFException will be thrown if the reader has reached the end of the file.
I have also explained, how using DataInputStream Object to read a file throws the EOFException in the following program.
Program:
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class Fileclassread
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
String line;
try
{
DataInputStream in=new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream("Child1.class"));
int bytesavailable=in.available();
System.out.println("Total no of bytes in the file "+bytesavailable);
for(int i=0;i
{
if(in.readInt()==0xCAFEBABE)
{
System.out.println("The minor version number:"+in.readShort());
System.out.println("The major version number:"+in.readShort());
}
}
}
catch(EOFException e)
{
System.out.println("the file has reached its end...");
}
catch(IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
output:
Total number of bytes in the file 227
The minor version number:0
The major version number:50
java.io.EOFException
at java.io.DataInputStream.readInt(Unknown Source)
at Fileclassread.main(Fileclassread.java:18)
If you see the output of the program,the first line shows how many bytes available in the class file.
Since readInt() will read 4 bytes of data at a time,the for loop should be limited to the value of 55,
because the two readShort() contributes the other 4 bytes.So a total of 224 bytes will be read.
The remaining 3 bytes cannot be read by using readInt() as it requires 4 bytes.Thus java.io.EOFException is thrown.
