Java – Where to put a text file in Grails, and how to get the path

filegrailsinputstreamjava

I need to read in a .txt file into a groovy class in order to interrogate it line by line. But I am not sure what folder I put it into in my grails app, and how to get the path to it?

So far I have tried placing it under src and also in a new folder web-app/txt

and I have tried the the following to read it in

fileIn = new File('/lexicon.txt').text

and

fileIn = new File('txt/lexicon.txt').text

to no avail.

Any body have any pointers?

Best Answer

Grails is a Java Web Application, so it will be compiled into a sigle file .war, with all files/classes/etc inside. Most Web containers do unpack war, but there are no any guaranteee, so it's not a good idea to use File to access this file as a file.

Btw, you can place your file into grails-app/conf, at this case it will be placed into classpath, and you'll be able to access it by using:

InputStream lexicon = this.class.classLoader.getResourceAsStream('lexicon.txt')

You could also put this file into a subdirectory, like grails-app/conf/data and load it as ***.getResourceAsStream('data/lexicon.txt')

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Python – How to get the path and name of the file that is currently executing

__file__

as others have said. You may also want to use os.path.realpath to eliminate symlinks:

import os

os.path.realpath(__file__)

Python – How to get file creation & modification date/times in Python

Getting some sort of modification date in a cross-platform way is easy - just call os.path.getmtime(path) and you'll get the Unix timestamp of when the file at path was last modified.

Getting file creation dates, on the other hand, is fiddly and platform-dependent, differing even between the three big OSes:

On Windows, a file's ctime (documented at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14h5k7ff.aspx) stores its creation date. You can access this in Python through os.path.getctime() or the .st_ctime attribute of the result of a call to os.stat(). This won't work on Unix, where the ctime is the last time that the file's attributes or content were changed.
On Mac, as well as some other Unix-based OSes, you can use the .st_birthtime attribute of the result of a call to os.stat().
On Linux, this is currently impossible, at least without writing a C extension for Python. Although some file systems commonly used with Linux do store creation dates (for example, ext4 stores them in st_crtime) , the Linux kernel offers no way of accessing them; in particular, the structs it returns from stat() calls in C, as of the latest kernel version, don't contain any creation date fields. You can also see that the identifier st_crtime doesn't currently feature anywhere in the Python source. At least if you're on ext4, the data is attached to the inodes in the file system, but there's no convenient way of accessing it.

The next-best thing on Linux is to access the file's mtime, through either os.path.getmtime() or the .st_mtime attribute of an os.stat() result. This will give you the last time the file's content was modified, which may be adequate for some use cases.

Putting this all together, cross-platform code should look something like this...

import os
import platform

def creation_date(path_to_file):
    """
    Try to get the date that a file was created, falling back to when it was
    last modified if that isn't possible.
    See http://stackoverflow.com/a/39501288/1709587 for explanation.
    """
    if platform.system() == 'Windows':
        return os.path.getctime(path_to_file)
    else:
        stat = os.stat(path_to_file)
        try:
            return stat.st_birthtime
        except AttributeError:
            # We're probably on Linux. No easy way to get creation dates here,
            # so we'll settle for when its content was last modified.
            return stat.st_mtime

Best Answer

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Python – How to get the path and name of the file that is currently executing

Python – How to get file creation & modification date/times in Python

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