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Being able to read a .dat in English, and then being able to edit the file

File file = new File(directory + player.getUsername() + ".dat");
if (!file.exists()) {
file.createNewFile();
}
FileOutputStream outFile = new FileOutputStream(file);
DataOutputStream write = new DataOutputStream(outFile);
write.writeUTF(player.getUsername());
write.writeUTF(player.getPassword());
write.writeInt(player.getStaffRights());
write.writeInt(player.getPosition().getX());
write.writeInt(player.getPosition().getY());
write.writeInt(player.getPosition().getZ());
write.writeInt(player.getGender());
Ok so pretty much what this code above does is it makes new character files for this game im working with. But the problem im having is that the character information that this code is putting into a .dat I cant read when I try and open in lets say notepad its just gibberish. I need to be able to open these .dats and be able to read/edit the text in english. Any help?

When you save data with a DataOutputStream, it will be saved in Java's native binary serialization format, not as plain text which you can read with for example Notepad.
If you want to write plain text to a file, use one of the subclasses of java.io.Writer to write to the file instead of DataOutputStream - for example PrintWriter.
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(file);
out.println(player.getUsername());
// etc...
// Also, don't forget to close when you are done
out.close();

Have the player object implement Serilizable and as long as all of its properties are serilizable as well, such as strings and ints, the serialization will be done.
Refer to the serialization tutorial:
Tutorial

java Files.readAllBytes(image.png) doesn't work

I was trying to read from file and then write to other file. I use code bellow to do so.
byte[] bytes = Files.readAllBytes(file1);
Writer Writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(file2), "UTF-8"));
for(int i=0;i<bytes.length;i++)
Writer.write(bytes[i]);
Writer.close();
But when I change file1 to picture.png and file2 to picture2.png, this method doesn't work and I can't open picture2.png using image viewer.
What have I done wrong?

Writers are for writing text, possibly in different formats (ie utf-8 / 16, etc). For writing raw bytes, don't use writers. Just use (File)OutputStreams.
It is truly as simple as
byte[] bytes = ...;
FileOutputStream fos = ...;
fos.write(bytes);

The other answers explain why what you have potentially fails.
I'm curious why you're already using one Java NIO method, but not others? The library already has methods to do this for you.
byte[] bytes = Files.readAllBytes(file1);
Files.write(file2, bytes, StandardOpenOption.CREATE_NEW); // or relevant OpenOptions
or
FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file2); // or buffered
Files.copy(file1, out);
out.close();
or
Files.copy(file1, file2, options);

The problem is that Writer.write() doesn't take a byte. It takes a char, which is variable size, and often bigger than one byte.
But once you've got the whole thing read in as a byte[], you can just use Files.write() to send the whole array to a file in much the same way that you read it in:
Files.write(filename, bytes);
This is the more modern NIO idiom, rather than using an OutputStream.
It's worth reading the tutorial.

BufferedWriter to write at BufferedReader position

My code reads through an xml file encoded with UTF-8 until a specfied string has been found. It finds the specified string fine, but I wish to write at this point in the file.
I would much prefer to do this through a stream as only small tasks need to be done.
I cannot find a way to do this. Any alternative methods are welcome.
Code so far:
final String RESOURCE = "/path/to/file.xml";
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(ClassLoader.class.getResourceAsStream(RESOURCE), "UTF-8"));
BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(ClassLoader.class.getResource(RESOURCE).getPath()),"UTF-8"));
String fileLine = in.readLine();
while (!fileLine.contains("some string")) {
fileLine = in.readLine();
}
// File writing code here

You can't really write into the middle of the file, except for overwriting existing bytes (using something like RandomAccessFile). that would only work, however, if what you needed to write was exactly the same byte length as what you were replacing, which i highly doubt.
instead, you need to re-write the file to a new file, copying the input to the output, replacing the parts you need to replace in the process. there are a variety of ways you could do this. i would recommend using a StAX event reader and writer as the StAX api is fairly user friendly (compared to SAX) as well as fast and memory efficient.

Commons Net FTPClient retrieved file encoding issue

I'm retrieving a file from a FTP Server. The file is encoded as UTF-8
ftpClient.connect(props.getFtpHost(), props.getFtpPort());
ftpClient.login(props.getUsername(), props.getPassword());
ftpClient.setFileType(FTP.BINARY_FILE_TYPE);
inputStream = ftpClient.retrieveFileStream(fileNameBuilder
.toString());
And then somewhere else I'm reading the input stream
bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
inputStream, "UTF-8"));
But the file is not getting read as UTF-8 Encoded!
I tried ftpClient.setAutodetectUTF8(true); but still doesn't work.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
For example a row in the original file is
...00248090041KENAN SARÐIN 00000000015.993FAC...
After downloading it through FTPClient, I parse it and load in a java object, one of the fields of the java object is name, which for this row is read as "KENAN SAR�IN"
I tried dumping to disk directly:
File file = new File("D:/testencoding/downloaded-file.txt");
FileOutputStream fop = new FileOutputStream(file);
ftpClient.retrieveFile(fileName, fop);
if (!file.exists()) {
file.createNewFile();
}
I compared the MD5 Checksums of the two files(FTP Server one and the and the one dumped to disk), and they're the same.

I would separate out the problems first: dump the file to disk, and compare it with the original. If it's the same as the original, the problem has nothing to do with UTF-8. The FTP code looks okay though, and if you're saying you want the raw binary data, I'd expect it not to mess with anything.
If the file is the same after transfer as before, then the problem has nothing to do with FTP. You say "the file is not getting read as UTF-8 Encoded" but it's not clear what you mean. How certain are you that it's UTF-8 text to start with? If you could edit your question with the binary data, how it's being read as text, and how you'd expect it to be read as text, that would really help.

Try to download the file content as bytes and not as characters using InputStream and OutputStream instead of InputStreamReader. This way you are sure that the file is not changed during transfer.

How to open a .dat file in java program

I was handed some data in a file with an .dat extension. I need to read this data in a java program and build the data into some objects we defined. I tried the following, but it did not work
FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream("news.dat");
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fstream));
Could someone tell me how to do this in java?

What kind of file is it? Is it a binary file which contains serialized Java objects? If so, then you rather need ObjectInputStream instead of DataInputStream to read it.
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("news.dat");
ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(fis);
Object object = ois.readObject();
// ...
(don't forget to properly handle resources using close() in finally, but that's beyond the scope of this question)
See also:
Basic serialization tutorial

A .dat file is usually a binary file, without any specific associated format. You can read the raw bytes of the file in a manner similar to what you posted - but you will need to interpret these bytes according to the underlying format. In particular, when you say "open" the file, what exactly do you want to happen in Java? What kind of objects do you want to be created? How should the stream of bytes map to these objects?
Once you know this, you can either write this layer yourself or use an existing API (assuming it's a standard format).
For reference, your example doesn't work because it assumes that the binary format is a character representation in the platform's default charset (as per the InputStreamReader constructor). And as you say it's binary, this will fail to convert the binary to a stream of characters (since, after all, it's not).
// BufferedInputStream not strictly needed, but much more efficient than reading
// one byte at a time
BufferedInputStream in = new BufferedInputStream (new FileInputStream("news.dat"));
This will give you a buffered stream which will return the raw bytes of the file; you can now either read and process them yourself, or pass this input stream to some library API that will create appropriate objects for you (if such a library exists).

That entirely depends on what sort of file the .dat is. Unfortunately, .dat is often used as a generic extension for a data file. It could be binary, in which case you could use FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream(new File("news.dat")); and call read() to get bytes from the file, or text, in which case you could use BufferedReader buff = new BufferedInputReader(new FileInputStream(new File("news.dat"))); and call readLine() to get each line of text. [edit]Or it could be Java objects in which case what BalusC said.[/edit]
In both cases, you'd then need to know what format the file was in to divide things up and get meaning from it, although this would be much easier if it was text as it could be done by inspection.

Please try the below code:
FileReader file = new FileReader(new File("File.dat"));
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(file);
String temp = br.readLine();
while (temp != null) {
temp = br.readLine();
System.out.println(temp);
}

A better way would be to use try-with-resources so that you would not have to worry about closing the resources.
Here is the code.
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("news.dat");
try(ObjectInputStream objectstream = new ObjectInputStream(fis)){
objectstream.readObject();
}
catch(IOException e){
//
}