Java — Log file only saving the latest item

Question

I am writing an app in Java (new developer) and I am trying to save messages and things like that within a log file (logs/[date].txt). The problem I am getting is that it's overwriting each time, rather than appending the values to my file.

Here is my code:

public void onMessage(String channel, String nick, String account, String hostname, String message) {
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss dd/MM/yyyy");
    SimpleDateFormat sdfd = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");
    Date now = new Date();

    try {
        /* Check if the logs folder exists */
        File logdir = new File("logs/");

        boolean result = true;
        if (!logdir.exists()) {
            try {
                logdir.mkdir();
            }catch(Exception e){
                System.err.println("[ERROR] Could not make directory 'logs/'");
                result = false;
            }
        }

        /* Check if the log file exists */
        File fcheck = new File("logs/" + sdfd.format(now).replace("/", "-") + ".txt");
        if (!fcheck.exists()) {
            try {
                fcheck.createNewFile();
            }catch (Exception e){
                System.err.println("[ERROR] Could not make log file 'logs/" + sdfd.format(now).replace("/", "-") + ".txt'");
            }
        }

        /* Write to file */
        if (result) {
            FileWriter file = new FileWriter("logs/" + sdfd.format(now).replace("/", "-") + ".txt");
            PrintWriter write = new PrintWriter(file);

            String entry = "[" + sdf.format(now) + "] [" + channel + "] " + nick + " (" + account + ") > " + message + "\n";
            write.append(entry);

            write.close();
            file.close();
        }else{
            System.err.println("[ERROR] Could not save line to log file.");
        }
    }catch (Exception e){
        System.err.println("[ERROR] Could not save line to log file.");
    }
}

Sorry if this isn't amazingly clear, but I'm still learning Java. As you can see, I have write.append(entry); — which I thought would append \n to my log file, thus allowing me to save and save and keep all the entries.

Answer 1

You are closing the PrintWriter on every entry - a new instance is created everytime you call that method and the file is overwritten.

If you do not want to change this, you can set the FileWriter to append mode by using FileWriter(String, boolean).

FileWriter file = new FileWriter("logs/" + sdfd.format(now).replace("/", "-") + ".txt", true);
PrintWriter write = new PrintWriter(file);