Thread: Class throws FileNotFoundException when called from another class

A friend and I are working on a simple game, and I have run into a roadblock. The program contains a class, called Area, whose purpose is to read in a series of coordinate pairs into an arraylist that tell the runner class where to place environmental sprites (trees, roads, houses, etc.) in the game screen. At the start of the game, the runner class reads these Area instances into a 2-dimensional array, so you'd have new Area(0,0) , new Area(0,1) ,etc.

The problem I'm having is that, while the Area class functions when the constructor is called from a public static void main within itself, when the runner class tries to create a new Area instance, it throws a FileNotFoundException. Can someone look at this code and help me figure out why it's not working?

public class Area {
	public static void main(String[]args){
		Area area = new Area(0,0);
	}
	int x = 0;
	int y = 0;
	public ArrayList<int[]>roads = new ArrayList<int[]>();
	public ArrayList<int[]>trees = new ArrayList<int[]>();
 
    Scanner input = null;
    String line = null;
    String[] locs = null;
    String search = null;
    boolean go = true;
    File file = new File("Areas.txt");
 
	public Area(int xCoord, int yCoord){
		x = xCoord;
		y = yCoord;
		search = (xCoord + " " + yCoord);
		try{
	        input = new Scanner(file);
	    }
	    catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
	        System.out.println("Cannot open Areas.txt");
	        System.exit(1);
	    } 
 
	    //all the code past this point is for reading in the coordinate data; it works fine
	}

A FileNotFoundException means the program can't find the file on the path specified by the File class object.
Are you sure the filename and the path name are correct?

To see where the program is looking for the file, print out the absolute path for the File class object.

What path prints out when you print the File class's absolute path?

Is that the correct path to the file?

it's close, but not exact

Computers require it to be exact. Close doesn't work.

Are you using relative paths vs absolute paths? Does the program change the current directory so the relative path would be to a different location?