Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

14.5. Sequential-Access Text Files

In this section, we create and manipulate sequential-access files. As mentioned earlier, these are files in which records are stored in order by the record-key field. We first demonstrate sequential-access files using text files, allowing the reader to quickly create and edit human-readable files. In the subsections of this chapter we discuss creating, writing data to, reading data from and updating sequential-access text files. We also include a credit-inquiry program that retrieves specific data from a file.

14.5.1. Creating a Sequential-Access Text File

Java imposes no structure on a file—notions such as a record do not exist as part of the Java language. Therefore, the programmer must structure files to ...