Reading & writing text in Scala, getting the encoding right?

Question

I'm reading and writings some text files in Scala. As a complete beginner in the language, I wanted to make sure to find the right way to do it, e.g. get the encoding right.

So most of the stuff I found (also on SO ) recommends I use io.Source.fromFile.However, after trying it out like so, reading a UTF-8 file:

val user_list = Source.fromFile("usernames.txt").getLines.toList
val user_list = Source.fromFile("usernames.txt", enc="UTF8").getLines.toList

I looked at the docs but was left with some questions.

Get the encoding right:

• the docs show that I can set an encoding in Source.fromFile as I tried above. Looking at the man on Codec and the types listed there, I was wondering if those are all my codec options - is there e.g. no Utf-16, Big-Endian vs Little-Endian, etc.?

• I am slightly obsessed with this since it used to trip me up in Python a lot. Is this less of concern with Scala for some reason?

Get the reading in right:

• All the examples I looked at used the getLines method and postprocessed it with MkString or List, etc. Is there any advantage to that over just reading in the entire file (my files are small) in one go?

Get the writing out right:

• Every source I could find tells me that Scala has no file writing function and to use the Java FileWriter. I was surprised by this - is this still accurate?

Looking at it I feel the question might be a little broad for SO, so I'd be happy to take it back if it does not meet the requirements. At this point, I'm not struggling with specific examples but rather trying to set things up in a way I don't get in trouble later. Thanks!

Answer 1

Scala only has a basic IO api in the standard library. For the most part you just use the java apis. The fact that a decent api from java exists is probably why the Scala team is not prioritizing having a robust and fully featured IO api.

There are also third party scala libraries you could use as well however. Better Files I've never used but heard good things about as a Scala file api. As well as fs2 which provides functional, streaming IO. I'm sure there are others out there as well.

For encoding, there are many possible encoding available. It's just that only a couple of the most common ones are available as static fields, the rest you typically access through Codec("Encoding Name"). Most apis will also let you just enter a String directly instead of needing to get a Codec instance first. The codec is really just a wrapper over java.nio.charset.Charset. You can run java.nio.charset.Charset.availableCharsets() to see all of the encodings available on your system.

As far as reading, if the files are small you can load them fully into memory if you prefer that. The only reason not to do so is if you want to avoid the extra memory use of loading the entire file at once if reading through line by line is enough. You may want to use Vector instead of List for efficiency reasons (Vector is better in many cases and should probably be preferred as a default collection, but tradition and old habits die hard and most people/guides seem to default to List, but this is a whole other topic)