Printing console output

Processing Coding Questions
1

Hello,
I’m trying to build a small sketch asking a website some weather data. Unfortunately, the site I’m asking data to throws back a 403 error and Processing seems not able to work. So I tried in this way, editing some code I found on the web:

// import libraries
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

URL url;

//Create a writer to print the console out
PrintWriter output = createWriter("weatherText.txt");

//
try {

  // Create a URL object
  url = new URL("URL-OF-THE-WEBSITE");
  URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
  conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB;     rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
  // Read all of the text returned by the HTTP server
  BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader
    (new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));

  String htmlText;

  while ( (htmlText = in.readLine ()) != null) {
    System.out.println(htmlText);
  }
  in.close();
} 

//Should be called once the website throws 403 back, case 1
catch (MalformedURLException e) {
  e.printStackTrace(output);
  System.out.println(output.toString());
} 

//Should be called once the website throws 403 back, case 2
catch (IOException e) {
  e.printStackTrace(output);
  System.out.println(output.toString());
}

//Clearing and closing after the job is done 
finally {
  output.flush(); 
  output.close(); 
  exit();
}

The console seems ok with all the text I want to work on. I now need to take the text in the console and save it in the file I create (weatherText.txt, which is correctly generated), but the file is empty.

May you kindly help me to figure out how to solve this issue?

2

you need to output to the PrintWriter :slight_smile:

output.println(htmlText);
3

Hello micuat,
the code you suggest is already included in line 24 of my sketch. I guess the issue arises in one of the two “catch” statement after that. There (lines 32 and 38) I wrote

  System.out.println(output.toString());

but replacing it with your code I have

        The variable "htmlText" does not exist

I think I have not properly defined local/global variables… any suggestion?

4

what you have is

System.out.println(htmlText);

which outputs to the console.

What I suggest is

output.println(htmlText);

to write to output object (the variable name may be confusing!)

5

Whoops think I forgot to check the output :sweat_smile:
Your solution works fine!

Can you please be so kind to address me to any resource/tutorial to go deeper in the print/println/printWriter stuff?

Thank you.

6

no problem!

basics are here
https://processing.org/reference/PrintWriter.html

if you want more info
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/io/PrintWriter.html