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Command Line Arguments

A Java application can accept command-line arguments from the user when launched. The runtime system passes the arguments to the application's main method via a String array. An example Echo application displays each argument on its own line. Command-line arguments are separated by spaces, but can be grouped together in quotes as a single argument. Numeric arguments must be converted from Strings using methods like Integer.parseInt().

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22 views

Command Line Arguments

A Java application can accept command-line arguments from the user when launched. The runtime system passes the arguments to the application's main method via a String array. An example Echo application displays each argument on its own line. Command-line arguments are separated by spaces, but can be grouped together in quotes as a single argument. Numeric arguments must be converted from Strings using methods like Integer.parseInt().

Uploaded by

Ravi Kiran
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Command-Line Arguments

A Java application can accept any number of arguments from the command line. This allows the user to specify configuration information when the application is launched. The user enters command-line arguments when invoking the application and specifies them after the name of the class to be run. For example, suppose a Java application calledSort sorts lines in a file. To sort the data in a file named friends.txt, a user would enter:
java Sort friends.txt

When an application is launched, the runtime system passes the command-line arguments to the application's main method via an array of Strings. In the previous example, the command-line arguments passed to the Sort application in an array that contains a single String: "friends.txt".
Echoing Command-Line Arguments

The Echo example displays each of its command-line arguments on a line by itself:
public class Echo { public static void main (String[] args) { for (String s: args) { System.out.println(s); } } }

The following example shows how a user might run Echo. User input is in italics.
java Echo Drink Hot Java Drink Hot Java

Note that the application displays each word Drink, Hot, and Java on a line by itself. This is because the space character separates command-line arguments. To haveDrink, Hot, and Java interpreted as a single argument, the user would join them by enclosing them within quotation marks.
java Echo "Drink Hot Java" Drink Hot Java

Parsing Numeric Command-Line Arguments

If an application needs to support a numeric command-line argument, it must convert a String argument that represents a number, such as "34", to a numeric value. Here is a code snippet that converts a command-line argument to an int:
int firstArg; if (args.length > 0) { try { firstArg = Integer.parseInt(args[0]); } catch (NumberFormatException e) { System.err.println("Argument must be an integer"); System.exit(1); } }

throws a NumberFormatException if the format of args[0] isn't valid. All of the Number classes Integer, Float, Double, and so on have parseXXXmethods that convert a String representing a number to an object of their type.
parseInt

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