Groovy Goodness: GString as Writable

The Groovy API has the interface Writable. Classes that implement this interface are capable of writing their selves to a java.io.Writer object. The interface has one method writeTo() where the code is that writes the contents to a given Writer instance. Most implementations will also use the implementation of the writeTo() method in their toString() implementation.

The GString implementation in Groovy also implements the Writable interface. This means we can redirect the GString contents to some Writer instance if we want to. In the following code we use a FileWriter to write the contents of a GString to a file:

def data = [
    new Expando(id: 1, user: 'mrhaki', country: 'The Netherlands'),
    new Expando(id: 2, user: 'hubert', country: 'The Netherlands'),
]

data.each { userData ->
    new File("${userData.id}.txt").withWriter('UTF-8') { fileWriter ->
        // Use writeTo method on GString to save
        // result in a file.
        "User $userData.user lives in $userData.country".writeTo(fileWriter)
    }
}


assert new File('1.txt').text == 'User mrhaki lives in The Netherlands'
assert new File('2.txt').text == 'User hubert lives in The Netherlands'

Code written with Groovy 2.2.2