badly worded, I've got it sorted now. Thanks for the time but the problem was down to me not noticing something incredibly obvious. The issue was I hadn't noticed the filepath when opening the filehandle in the code I gave had the C:\\ knocked off, so the resulting file was being saved elsewhere. I only noticed after almut got me to take out the printToFile method

Incredibly stupid but I've learn't a lot more by leading myself down the garden path