Getting resources from a .jar file

[Preacher]

Hi i'm having trouble getting resources to load from a .jar file. I'll start from the start. i'm developing a chess game that use's a plugin system. each plugin is encapsulated in a .jar file which resides in a /plugin/ directory. the core of the system looks for valid jar files in the /plugin/ directory and uses a modified class loader to load the appropiate classes.

The side affect of this is that classes root address is now the same as the core systems root, so using relative addressing is a little awkward.

I have succesfully loaded images from inside the .jar file by getting their absolute path e.g. getClass().getResource() and feeding this URL into a ImageIcon() which handles all the image loading itself, it uses Toolkit.getImage() under the hood to achieve this.

The problem is that i can't load files that require a string as an argument e.g File(String), i'm trying to load an .ase model  at the moment from a .jar file using the same method but the File object throws a FileNotFoundError.

The path is absolutly correct an example of the argument being passed to the File object is

/E:/myproject/plugins/UserInterface.jar!/models/board.ase

I presume the ! after the .jar means its an archive. anyway any help with this would be great.

[javatypo]

First.. dont use ImageIcon. use ImageIO.read()

and .. since getClass().getResource() returns a URL, then what u do is open an inputstream from that and read the bytes.

[kevglass]

or use getResourceAsStream()

Kev

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[Jeff]

The ! means that what preceeds it is a zip file and what follows is the path within the zip.

The filesystem knows nothing about zip files.  If you want to load that you have two choiues:

(1) use getResourceAsStream() and read the stream in
(2) Open the Zip (a jar is a zip really) file yourself using ZipFile (or JarFile for the exntended Jar info) and parsing through it.  there is an exampel under ZipFile in the Java CLass Libraries book.