File Handling - garsue/libgdx GitHub Wiki

Libgdx applications run on four different platforms: desktop systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, headless), Android, iOS, and JavaScript/WebGL capable browsers. Each of these platforms handles file I/O a little differently.

Libgdx's Files (code) module provides the ability to:

• Read from a file
• Write to a file
• Copy a file
• Move a file
• Delete a file
• List files and directories
• Check whether a file/directory exists

Before we can dive into that aspect of Libgdx, we have to first review the different notions of filesystems for all supported platforms.

Here we review the filesystem paradigms of the platforms Libgdx supports

On a desktop OS, the filesystem is one big chunk of memory. Files can be referenced with paths relative to the current working directory (the directory the application was executed in) or absolute paths. Ignoring file permissions, files and directories are usually readable and writable by all applications.

On Android the situation is a little bit more complex. Files can be stored inside the application's APK either as resources or as assets. These files are read-only. Libgdx only uses the assets mechanism, as it provides raw access to the byte streams and more closely resembles a traditional filesystem. Resources better lend themselves to normal Android applications but introduce problems when used in games. Android manipulates them at load time, e.g. it automatically resizes images.

Assets are stored in your Android project's assets directory and will be packaged with your APK automatically when you deploy your application. No other application can access these files.

Files can also be stored on the internal storage, where they are readable and writable. Each installed application has a dedicated internal storage directory. This directory is again only accessible by that application. One can think of this storage as a private working area for the application.

Finally, files can be stored on the external storage, such as an SD-card. External storage might not always be available, e.g. the user could pull out the SD-card. Files in this storage location should thus be considered volatile. You will need to add a permission to your AndroidManifest.xml file to be allowed to write to the external storage, see Permissions

On iOS all file types are available.

A raw Javascript/WebGL application doesn't have a traditional filesystem concept. Instead, assets like images are referenced by URLs pointing to files on one or more servers. Modern browsers also support Local Storage which comes close to a traditional read/write filesystem.

Libgdx does some magic under the hood to provide you with a read-only filesystem abstraction.

A file in libgdx is represented by an instance of the FileHandle class. A FileHandle has a type which defines where the file is located. The following table illustrates the availability and location of each file type for each platform.

Absolute and classpath files are mostly used for tools such as desktop editors, that have more complex file i/o requirements. For games these can be safely ignored. The order in which you should use the types is as follows:

• Internal Files: all the assets (images, audio files, etc.) that are packaged with your application are internal files. If you use the Setup UI, just drop them in your Android project's assets folder.
• Local Files: if you need to write small files to e.g. save a game state, use local files. These are in general private to your application. If you want a key/value store instead, you can also look into Preferences.
• External Files: if you need to write big files, e.g. screenshots, or download files from the web, they should go on the external storage. Note that the external storage is volatile, a user can remove it or delete the files you wrote.

The different storage types might not be available depending on the platform your application runs on. You can query this kind of information via the Files module:

boolean isExtAvailable = Gdx.files.isExternalStorageAvailable();
boolean isLocAvailable = Gdx.files.isLocalStorageAvailable();

You can also query the root paths for external and local storage:

String extRoot = Gdx.files.getExternalStoragePath();
String locRoot = Gdx.files.getLocalStoragePath();

A FileHandle is obtained by using one of the aforementioned types directly from the Files module. The following code obtains a handle for the internal myfile.txt file.

FileHandle handle = Gdx.files.internal("data/myfile.txt");

If you used the [setup UI | Project Setup, Running & Debugging], this file will be contained in your Android project's assets folder, $ANDROID_PROJECT/assets/data to be exact. Your desktop and html projects link to this folder in Eclipse, and will pick it up automatically when executed from within Eclipse.

FileHandle handle = Gdx.files.classpath("myfile.txt");

The “myfile.txt” file is located in the directory where the compiled classes reside or the included jar files.

FileHandle handle = Gdx.files.external("myfile.txt");

In this case, “myfile.txt” needs to be in the users’ home directory (/home/<user>/myfile.txt on Linux, /Users/<user>/myfile.txt on OSX and C:\Users\<user>\myfile.txt on Windows) on desktop, and in the root of the SD card on Android.

FileHandle handle = Gdx.files.absolute("/some_dir/subdir/myfile.txt");

In the case of absolute file handle, the file has to be exactly where the full path points. In /some_dir/subdir/ of the current drive on Windows or the exact path on linux, MacOS and Android.

FileHandle instances are passed to methods of classes the are responsible for reading and writing data. E.g. a FileHandle needs to be specified when loading an image via the Texture class, or when loading an audio file via the Audio module.

Sometimes it is necessary to check for the existence of a specific file or list the contents of a directory. FileHandle provides methods to do just that in a concise way.

Here's an example that checks whether a specific file exists and whether a file is actually a directory or not.

boolean exists = Gdx.files.external("doitexist.txt").exists();
boolean isDirectory = Gdx.files.external("test/").isDirectory();

Listing a directory is equally simple:

FileHandle[] files = Gdx.files.local("mylocaldir/").list();
for(FileHandle file: files) {
   // do something interesting here
}

Note: Listing of internal directories is not supported on Desktop.

We can also ask for the parent directory of a file or create a FileHandle for a file in a directory (aka "child").

FileHandle parent = Gdx.files.internal("data/graphics/myimage.png").parent();
FileHandle child = Gdx.files.internal("data/sounds/").child("myaudiofile.mp3");

parent would point to "data/graphics/", child would point to data/sounds/myaudiofile.mp3".

There are many more methods in FileHandle that let you check for specific attributes of a file. Please refer to the Javadocs for detail.

Note: These functions are mostly unimplemented in the HTML5 back-end at the moment. Try to not rely on them to much if HTML5 will be a target of your application.

Some operations on FileHandles can fail. We adopted RuntimeExceptions to signal errors instead of checked Exceptions. Our reasoning goes like this: 90% of the time we will access files that we know exist and are readable (e.g. internal files packaged with our application).

After obtaining a FileHandle, we can either pass it to a class that knows how to load content from the file (e.g. an image), or read it ourselves. The latter is done through any of the input methods in the FileHandle class. The following example illustrates how to load text from an internal file:

FileHandle file = Gdx.files.internal("myfile.txt");
String text = file.readString();

If you have binary data, you can easily load the file into a {{{byte[]}}} array:

FileHandle file = Gdx.files.internal("myblob.bin");
byte[] bytes = file.readBytes();

The FileHandle class has many more read methods. Check the Javadocs for more information.

Similarly to reading files, FileHandle also provides methods to write to a file. Note that only the local, external and absolute file types support writing to a file. Writing a string to a file works as follows:

FileHandle file = Gdx.files.local("myfile.txt");
file.writeString("My god, it's full of stars", false);

The second parameter of FileHandle#writeString specifies if the content should be appended to the file. If set to false, the current content of the file will be overwritten.

One can of course also write binary data to a file:

FileHandle file = Gdx.files.local("myblob.bin");
file.writeBytes(new byte[] { 20, 3, -2, 10 }, false);

There are many more methods in FileHandle that facilitate writing in different ways, e.g. using OutputStream. Again, refer to the Javadocs for details.

These operations are again only possible for writable file types (local, external, absolute). Note however, that the source for a copying operation can also be a read only FileHandle. A few examples:

FileHandle from = Gdx.files.internal("myresource.txt");
from.copyTo(Gdx.files.external("myexternalcopy.txt");

Gdx.files.external("myexternalcopy.txt").rename("mycopy.txt");
Gdx.files.external("mycopy.txt").moveTo(Gdx.files.local("mylocalcopy.txt"));

Gdx.files.local("mylocalcopy.txt").delete();

Note that source and target can be files or directories.

For more information on available methods, check the FileHandle Javadocs.