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 called
Sort
sorts lines in a file. To sort the data in a file namedfriends.txt
, a user would enter:When an application is launched, the runtime system passes the command-line arguments to the application's main method via an array ofjava Sort friends.txtString
s. In the previous example, the command-line arguments passed to theSort
application is an array that contains a singleString
: "friends.txt
".
Theexample displays each of its command-line arguments on a line by itself:
Echo
The following example shows how a user might runpublic class Echo { public static void main (String[] args) { for (String s: args) { System.out.println(s); } } }Echo
. User input is in italics.Note that the application displays each word —java Echo Drink Hot Java Drink Hot JavaDrink
,Hot
, andJava
— on a line by itself. This is because the space character separates command-line arguments. to haveDrink
,Hot
, andJava
interpreted as a single argument, the user would join them by enclosing them within quotation marks.java Echo "Drink Hot Java" Drink Hot Java
If an application needs to support a numeric command-line argument, it must convert aString
argument that represents a number, such as "34", to a numeric value. Here is a code snippet that converts a command-line argument to anint
: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); } }parseInt
throws aNumberFormatException
if the format ofargs[0]
isn't valid. All of theNumber
classes —Integer
,Float
,Double
, and so on — haveparseXXX
methods that convert aString
representing a number to an object of their type.