Import statements for PrintWriter

Question

I was searching for information on how to write text from Java to a file and I read this question

How do I create a file and write to it in Java?

however, none of the answers included what needs to be imported to make PrintWriter work.

QUESTION: What are the correct import statements for PrintWriter? If this is NOT my issue, please tell me what the issue is and how to solve it.

PLEASE USE PLAIN ENGLISH!! I am amateur coder with zip experience, so explain this to me like you are talking to a 7th grader.

Here is my code:

import java.util.Random;
import java.util.*;
import java.lang.Object;

public class Driver01 {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter("the-file-name.txt", "UTF-8");

        for (int b = 1; b < 10001; b++) {
            int x = (int) (Math.random() * 9);
            int y = (int) (Math.random() * 9);
            int z = (int) (Math.random() * 9);
            int a = (int) (Math.random() * 9);

            writer.print(b + ":" + x);
            writer.print(y);
            writer.print(z);
            writer.print(a);
            writer.println("");

            writer.close();
        }

    }

}

Answer 1

I'm going to attempt to answer the question(s) I think you're asking, plus offer some (possibly redundant) advice on StackOverflow questions -- this doesn't look like your first time here, exactly, but I can see that you're new.

The reason posts don't necessarily tell you what to import is that, if you don't know already, a simple google search for "java Classname", substituting the class you want, will tell you. In this case, PrintWriter is in the java.io package, so the import is java.io.PrintWriter.

As was pointed out in the comments, you probably don't want to close the PrintWriter you've instantiated until after you are out of the loop. As the code stands, I would expect it to crash the second time through the loop on the first statement that attempts to write to the file.

To ask good StackOverflow questions, try to keep in mind that we don't know what you're trying to do, we don't know what you've tried, and we don't know what your question is until/unless you tell us. SO lurkers don't tend to write programs for people, especially people who have not shown us what they've tried (and that they HAVE tried); this helps further define the question, and tells us what not to try or suggest ourselves.

When you have a little program like this, post the whole thing and tell us it is the whole thing.

If you have a compiler error, paste the entire compiler error into your question and say what you want to know about it.

If you have a runtime stacktrace, paste the entire stacktrace into your question and say what you want to know about it.

If the program is simply not doing what you expect, tell us (1) what it is doing, and (2) what you expect.

Often in the course of this, after you've done it for a while, you will find your own answer to your question before you've posted it; it is one way SO helps, by guiding us to focus on the problem in a way that questions can be answered.

Good luck.

Answer 2

Well, you need to import PrintWriter itself.

import java.io.PrintWriter;

After that, you'll run into another problem. PrintWriter can throw some exceptions which you'll need to handle. The lesson I've linked should be more than enough to get you going with that.

That should pretty much cover it.