Error message: The file "countries.geo.json" is missing or inaccessible

Question

I am taking the Coursera OOP in Java class. In the module 4 assignment, I run the code that the course provides in EarthquakeCityMap.java, and I get an error as "The file "countries.geo.json" is missing or inaccessible, make sure the URL is valid or that the file has been added to your sketch and is readable. Exception in thread "Animation Thread" java.lang.NullPointerException"

I tried to set countryFile as "../data/countries.geo.json", "data/countries.geo.json", and the complete path of countries file, but still didn't solve the problem.

//this error points to the code
private String countryFile = "countries.geo.json";
List<Feature> countries = GeoJSONReader.loadData(this, countryFile);"

//the countries file is saved in data folder.

Poject folder listing

I would trust the error and figure out where that file **is**. — Elliott Frisch, Jan 02 '19 at 02:37
What is the current directory when you run the code? The path to `countries.geo.json` must be relative to whatever that directory is. — Andreas, Jan 02 '19 at 02:48

DarkRift · Answer 1 · 2019-01-02T19:08:03.647

If you specified the full path and it didn’t work, you probably forgot to escape the \ character with another backslash. The backslash character is special and needs to be doubled for windows path to be interpreted properly. For instance “c:\\users\\...”. You can also specify / instead of \ and it would work : “c:/users/...”

That said, the path resolution of a file when relative (IE not being absolute to the file system root) is relative to the working directory of the executed app. Typically, in an IDE without any special configuration, the working directory would be the root path of the project. So in order to get the relative file path resolved properly, you would have to specify the path as “data/countries.geo.json”.

You can also find out what path you are in when you run the app by doing a System.out.println(new java.io.File(“.”).getAbsolutePath()) and craft the relative path according to this folder.

George Profenza · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-04T12:18:03.907

"countries.geo.json" (unless changed in GeoJSONReader manipulates this path) will be relative to the compiled java .class files in the IntelliJ's project out folder.

If this in GeoJSONReader.loadData(this, countryFile); is a PApplet instance you can use sketchPath() to make that path relative to the folder from which the sketch runs:

List<Feature> countries = GeoJSONReader.loadData(this, this.sketchPath("data"+File.separator+countryFile));

The above snippet is based on an assumption so the syntax in your code might be slightly different, but hopefully this illustrates how you'd use sketchPath().

Additionally there's a dataPath() as well which you can test from your main PApplet in setup() as a test:

String fullJSONPath = dataPath("countries.geo.json");
println("fullJSONPath: " + fullJSONPath);//hopefully this prints the full path to the json file on your machine
println(new File(fullJSONPath).exists());//hopefully this prints true

Error message: The file "countries.geo.json" is missing or inaccessible

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