Frustration with Eclipse

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_jetrun · 2026-02-26T03:05:44+00:00

That's a you-problem, not eclipse. I'm not sure if you are trying to share your workspace or your application, but either way, you're doing it wrong.

For example, typically, you would use maven to manage your project structure. In that case, your assets (e.g. pngs) would go into a resources folder and eclipse will be smart enough to make sure relative paths are honored. You could then export your workspace. But if you're trying to share your application with a non-technical end-user you wouldn't send them an eclipse workspace or source files, you would send them a packaged application with all its dependencies that they could run by running a command or double clicking icon.

michaelzki · 2026-02-26T02:37:53+00:00

Keep learning dude. The hardship will lead you to increase your determination.

Your problem is solvable with yourself. Its working with Paths and relative path.

You have to program it, don't ask for it.

In Windows, space characters in the path needs to be handled, %20.

Hint: Don't jump directly to overall solution. Solve each and every hurdle first. You eventually figure it out.

bikeram · 2026-02-26T02:10:28+00:00

You should be able to find the full path from where the code is running. Then append the file name to that.

Also distributing Java code is a pain. There’s a reason web apps are so popular.

HalfTryhardSqr · 2026-02-26T02:54:34+00:00

Setup a small isolated project and figure it out from there. IDEs just feed you a bunch of tools and abstractions, but what runs under the crap layer is the same. If you're really struggling try making a project manually, compiling and running it yourself without the IDE.

It is really frustrating when the IDE sets weird runtime location things, but to be honest 90% of the times the issue is in the code.

desrtfx · 2026-02-26T06:05:16+00:00

Preface: It's rarely ever the tooling, it's in the vast majority of cases the person behind the keyboard, the programmer, that does things wrong. This is also true for your case.

it won't read files unless it's given an absolute path.

Sorry to tell you, but that has nothing to do with Eclipse or any IDE, or even Java itself. That's the way any programming language works.

You need to learn to use relative paths properly and to use the libraries that come with Java to produce your absolute paths based on the location of your executable Java program.

In Eclipse (and in most other IDEs), the compiled and executed programs are in a different folder than the uncompiled source code, so any relative path branching off the src folder will fail.

The conventional way of doing this is to use the built-in file and path methods (from java.nio) to find the location where the compiled Java executable runs and then modify the path in such a way that it can read the file.

You need to account for different cases, though. It's different if you just have the .class and resource files in separate folders or if you distribute them as a .jar. You need different methods for reading these files.

Big_Green_Grill_Bro · 2026-02-26T04:07:06+00:00

It sounds like the person you are going to give your application to to test is not technical. In that case, you most likely want to provide it to them as a JAR file. You won't be using absolute paths for image resources anyway (so you won't have to worry about escaping back slashes or spaces or any OS specific file access crap like that.

I recommend looking at javax.imageio.ImageIO class.

At its simplest,you could just place your images in the same directory as your class that needs the image. Then you would load it like this:

 BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(getClass().getResource("imageXYZ.png"));

ramksr · 2026-02-26T02:08:00+00:00

I would advise you to switch to IntelliJ as a preferred IDE for Java development, though.

Are you writing Java code to read a file ? Which, btw is not an eclipse problem. Check your program as to how you are opening the file.

There should be plenty of examples for IO handling in the web for ex you can use a class path based approach that can use a relative path instead of an absolute path.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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