File Handling: Writing and Saving a Text File

[Tigerwoods09]

This tutorial is a continuation of our previous tutorial called “File Handling: How to Open a Text File in Visual Basic”. But this time we’re going to focus on how to create and save a text file. To start in this lesson, open our previous project named “FileHandling”.

Then, we’re going to add another sub menu called “save” and we need also to add another control named SaveFileDialog from the toolbox.

This will look like as shown below:

At this time, double click the save sub menu and add the following code:
In this code we use a StreamWriter class that inherits from the abstract class TextWriter that represents a writer, meaning it is able to write a series of character.

1. 'call the savefiledialog
   
2. SaveFileDialog1.
   
   ShowDialog
   
   (
   
   )
   
3. 'we use StreamWriter for writing characters to a stream
   
4. Dim
   
   myStreamWriter As
   
   System.
   
   IO
   
   .
   
   StreamWriter
   
5. 'we set default for savefiledialog filter
   
6. SaveFileDialog1.
   
   Filter
   
   =
   
   "Text [*.txt*]|*.txt|All Files [*.*]|*.*"
   
7. 'set the checkpath to true
   
8. SaveFileDialog1.
   
   CheckPathExists
   
   =
   
   True
   
9. 'set the Savefiledialog title
   
10. SaveFileDialog1.
    
    Title
    
    =
    
    "Save File"
    
11. 
    
12. Try
    
13. 'gets a string containing the filename selected in the dialog box
    
14. myStreamWriter =
    
    System.
    
    IO
    
    .
    
    File
    
    .
    
    AppendText
    
    (
    
    SaveFileDialog1.
    
    FileName
    
    )
    
15. 'it writes the string to stream
    
16. myStreamWriter.
    
    Write
    
    (
    
    RichTextBox1.
    
    Text
    
    )
    
17. 'clears all buffers for the current writer and causes any
    
18. 'buffered data to be written to the underlying stream
    
19. myStreamWriter.
    
    Flush
    
    (
    
    )
    
20. Catch
    
    ex As
    
    Exception
    
21. 'catch unnecesary errors
    
22. MsgBox
    
    (
    
    ex.
    
    Message
    
    )
    
23. 
    
24. End
    
    Try
    

When you execute the code above, it will look like as shown below.