Storing txt files

Question

I'm working on a sort of a magazine app which contains a lot of txt files which I read the text from (only read not write) , And I'm a little bit confused , I have read the documentation about file storage but still don't seem to get the right way to store my txt files. Should those files be in the the Assets? Is it possible to have a folders inside the assets? And if yes how can I acsses these folders?

Answer 1

res/raw will be a good place to put them. If you placed a text file named "article.txt" in the raw resource folder, you would start by putting the file into an InputStream like this (note that "ctx" is a Context which an Activity inherits from):

InputStream inputStream = ctx.getResources().openRawResource(R.raw.article);

Then you turn the InputStream into a String. This can be done about 1000 different ways. Here's one way:

InputStreamReader inputreader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream);

BufferedReader buffreader = new BufferedReader(inputreader);
String line;
StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();

try {
    while (( line = buffreader.readLine()) != null) {
        text.append(line);
        text.append('\n');
    }
} catch (IOException e) {
    return null;
}

String fileContentsStr = text.toString();

Here is a fully working method (using the above conversion technique) to turn a text file from the raw folder into a string. Which I got from this post Android read text raw resource file.

public static String readRawTextFile(Context ctx, int resId)
{
  InputStream inputStream = ctx.getResources().openRawResource(resId);

  InputStreamReader inputreader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream);
  BufferedReader buffreader = new BufferedReader(inputreader);
  String line;
  StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();

  try {
    while (( line = buffreader.readLine()) != null) {
      text.append(line);
      text.append('\n');
    }
  } catch (IOException e) {
    return null;
  }
  return text.toString();
}

Using "article.txt" still, you would call this method from an Activity like so:

readRawTextFile(this, R.raw.article);