Display Textbox (JOptionPane) multiples lines of text

[akingcool]

I am trying to design a file reader with some sort of GUI so I decided to use JOptionPane. I am a complete noob trying to learn java.

So far, I have managed to make my program produce a pop up for the file location, and also an error message if the program can't locate the file.
However, I cant get the results to display in one single box, it displays one for each line as I could only get it to work in the loop which would obviously do that. How do I go about displaying all the lines from the file in one output box?

package readtextfile;
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;

public class Main
{
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException
    {
        String file_name = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, "What's the File Location?");
                
        
        //"C:/Users/MyBook/Documents/TestProgram/testdocument.txt"

        try
        {
            ReadFile file = new ReadFile(file_name);
            String[] arrayLines = file.OpenContents();

            int i;
            for (i=0; i<arrayLines.length; i++)
            {
                JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, arrayLines[i]);
            }
        }

        //if there is an error, catch will produce error message
        catch (IOException errorMessage) //errorMessage is a variable, IOException type
        {
            JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "File Not Found!");
            System.out.println(errorMessage.getMessage());
            System.out.printf("File %s can not be found.\n\n", file_name ); //getMessage is a method of IOException
        }
    }
}

package readtextfile;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.BufferedReader;

public class ReadFile
{
    private String path;

    public ReadFile(String file_path)
    {
        path = file_path;
    }


    int readLines() throws IOException
    {
        FileReader file = new FileReader(path);
        BufferedReader buffer = new BufferedReader(file);

        String aLine;
        int numberOfLines = 0;

        while ((aLine = buffer.readLine() ) !=null) //read each line until null value reached
        {
            numberOfLines++;
        }

        buffer.close();
        return numberOfLines;
    }

    public String[] OpenContents() throws IOException
    {
        FileReader fr = new FileReader(path);
        BufferedReader buffer = new BufferedReader(fr);

        int numberOfLines = readLines();
        String[] textData = new String[numberOfLines];

        int i;

        for (i=0; i<numberOfLines; i++)
        {
            textData[i] = buffer.readLine();
        }

        buffer.close();
        return textData;
    }
}

[NormR1]

How do I go about displaying all the lines from the file in one output box?

Concatenate the lines together separated by new line characters (\n)

[akingcool]

i know how to do it like this:

String message = String.format("What's the File Location?\neg: C:/User/Desktop/Test.txt");
        String file_name = JOptionPane.showInputDialog(null, message);

but not when its an array? can you give me any more advice?

[NormR1]

Remove the lines from the array.

[akingcool]

thats what Im stuck on.. i tried to do that but the best I could do was get the last line of text from the array as the loop kept writting over the previous entry.

I am a complete newbie at this as I have only just started learning this. Could you possibly show me how its done? :)

[NormR1]

Write a loop that goes thru the array and gets its elements one at a time and concatenates that element to the String to be shown in the JOptionPane.
After the loop ends, show the String.

[akingcool]

how do i do it so that it doesn't overwrite the previous entry in the string? I tried that and just keeps overwritting the previous entry and showing me the last line in the txt file.

[NormR1]

Post the code that shows what you are doing.

Do you know how to concatenate Strings?
aString += "add this to the String";

[akingcool]

thanks that did the trick! the book I am using hasn't mentioned how to conatenate Strings yet so didnt know to do that, thanks for your help! :)

heres what I ended up doing:

try
        {
            ReadFile file = new ReadFile(file_name);
            String[] arrayLines = file.OpenContents();
            String displayMessage = null;
            

            int i;
            for (i=0; i<arrayLines.length; i++)
            {
                displayMessage += arrayLines[i];
                displayMessage += "\n";
            }
            JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, displayMessage);

[NormR1]

Glad you got it to work.

[mKorbel]

better would be look at JTextArea#write(Writer out) throws IOException then put JTextArea to JOptionPane