How to write to Standard Output using BufferedWriter

Question

I am currently writing an application that produces several log files using BufferedWriter. While debugging, however, I want to write to System.out instead of a file. I figured I could change from:

log = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(tokenizerLog)); 

to:

BufferedWriter log = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(System.out)); log.write("Log output\n"); 

as opposed to:

System.out.println("log output") 

The new OutputStreamWriter option has not been working though. How do I change just the Object inside the BufferedWriter constructor to redirect from a file to Standard out. Because I have several log files I will be writing to, using System.out everywhere and changing the output to a file isn't really an option.

Answer 1

Your approach does work, you are just forgetting to flush the output:

try {       BufferedWriter log = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(System.out));    log.write("This will be printed on stdout!\n");   log.flush(); } catch (Exception e) {   e.printStackTrace(); } 

The both OutputStreamWriter and PrintWriter are Writer instances so you can just do something like:

BufferedWriter log;  Writer openForFile(String fileName) {   if (fileName != null)     return new PrintWriter(fileName);   else     return new OutputStreamWriter(System.out); }  log = new BufferedWriter(openForFile(null)); //stdout log = new BufferedWriter(openForFile("mylog.log")); // using a file 

or whatever, it is just to give you the idea..

Answer 2

Since you mention that this is for logging, you might want to look at using a logger library like log4j. It'll let you change the log destination (either log file or console) by making changes in configuration files only.