RAII in Java… is resource disposal always so ugly?

Question

I just played with Java file system API, and came down with the following function, used to copy binary files. The original source came from the Web, but I added try/catch/f

Answer 1

The try/finally pattern is the correct way to handle streams in most cases for Java 6 and lower.

Some are advocating silently closing streams. Be careful doing this for these reasons: Java: how not to make a mess of stream handling

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Java 7 introduces try-with-resources:

/** transcodes text file from one encoding to another */
public static void transcode(File source, Charset srcEncoding,
                             File target, Charset tgtEncoding)
                                                             throws IOException {
    try (InputStream in = new FileInputStream(source);
         Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(in, srcEncoding);
         OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(target);
         Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(out, tgtEncoding)) {
        char[] buffer = new char[1024];
        int r;
        while ((r = reader.read(buffer)) != -1) {
            writer.write(buffer, 0, r);
        }
    }
}

AutoCloseable types will be automatically closed:

public class Foo {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    class CloseTest implements AutoCloseable {
      public void close() {
        System.out.println("Close");
      }
    }
    try (CloseTest closeable = new CloseTest()) {}
  }
}