General utility classes

This page describes some (not all) features of the utility classes.

Streams with LATIN1:

The stream and reader/writer classes from the Java API use the default encoding. The project "java-unidu" contains some classes using LATIN1 (ISO-8859-1) instead.

The class de.unidu.is.util.ISOReader is an extension to java.io.InputStreamReader wich always uses LATIN1 (ISO-8859-1) as encoding. The writer corresponding class is de.unidu.is.util.ISOWriter.

The classes de.unidu.is.util.FileISOReader and de.unidu.is.util.FileISOWriter should be used instead of the traditional file reader/writer.

In addition, de.unidu.is.util.URLISOReader can be used to get a LATIN1-based reader from a URL.

String processing:

The class de.unidu.is.util.StringUtilities provides some static methods for string processing, e.g. for converting an array or a collection in a string, for entity en/decoding for XML, for removing all tags, for extracting text from HTML, for replacing text by another text, or for removing text (originated from times before JDK 1.4 was released).

XML processing:

The class de.unidu.is.util.XMLUtilities provides some static methods for XML processing, e.g. for converting an array or a collection in a string, for conveniently parsing XML files or strings, for nicely formatted output of XML documents, for converting HTML streams into XHTML documents, and for text extraction via XPath.

Locating files:

The class de.unidu.is.util.SystemUtilities provides some static methods for find files on the classpath. The methods scas the classpath. For each JAR, the file must be located in the beginning (jar:file://...!/file). For each directory, the file must be located in that directoy or in its direct parent directory. Some methods return the first match, others all matches. These methods can be used for locating configuration files.

Managing collections:

The class de.unidu.is.util.CollectionUtilities provides some static methods for adding all objects returned converting iterators into collections.

The class de.unidu.is.util.EmptyIterator can be used if an iterator is required which returns no object at all.

The class de.unidu.is.util.SingleItemIterator can be used if an iterator over a single object is needed.

The class de.unidu.is.util.SequenceIterator has to initialised with an iterator which returns other iterators. The sequence iterator then iterators over the first returned iterator, then over the second and so on.

The class de.unidu.is.util.AcceptFilterIterator iterates over another iterator and checks for each object if it should be returned. For this, a sub-class has to be created which implements the boolean accept(Object) method.

Stopwatch:

The class de.unidu.is.util.StopWatch provides some methods for measuring time (in milliseconds), e.g. for simple profiling. A stop watch can be started, stopped, restarted and reset. The average and the total time can be formatted as strings (in milliseconds, in seconds, and in minutes).