URFUBAR

10 May 2004

We interrupt your regular stream of snarky political commentary with some snarky programming commentary.

I’m trying to write Java code that can locate a directory somewhere on the run-time classpath, and then iterate through the files in that directory. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:

• The ClassLoader.getResource(String) method returns a URL object.
• One of the File constructors takes a URI argument. None of them take URLs, though.
• The documentation for the URI class assures me that “every URL is a URI, but not every URI is a URL.”
• The URI.toURL() method, as you might expect, converts a URI into a URL.
• There is, as far as I can tell, no corresponding method to convert in the other direction. I think I can fake it by calling someURI = new URI, null), except that in order for that code to compile, I have to catch URISyntaxException. But if “every URL is a URI,” I should always be able to convert from one to the other without throwing an exception, right?

• Later: Score one for Hillary
• Earlier: URFUBAR, part II