Program help

[Stephen Barrow]

Im trying to make a program using io that will read 5 records from a text file. They are in the format of name, age, sex, and gpa
ex=John Doe 25 M 3.2
I have to write a method that will display all five on the screen. I can do that the first part of my code works. Then I have to use indexOf and get the gpa's out and then insert them into another file I create. That is what I am having trouble on. My code is below.
import javax.swing.*;
import java.io.*;
class HW_4_Code2 {
public static void main (String[] args) throws IOException {
//setup file and stream
File inFile = new File("C:\\hw4\\rawData.txt");
FileInputStream inStream = new FileInputStream(inFile);
//set up an array to read data in
int fileSize = (int)inFile.length();
byte[] byteArray = new byte[fileSize];
//read data in and display them
inStream.read(byteArray);
for (int i = 0; i < fileSize; i++) {
System.out.print((char)byteArray[i]);
}
inStream.close();

String last = inFile.substring(inFile.indexOf(" ")+1,
inFile.length());
System.out.println(+last);
}
}

[Billybob Marshall]

First off, you're going to run into more difficulty because you have no logical field separators.
John Doe 25 M 3.2
(How is a program supposed to "know" what part of that is the age, for example? Are all names firstName(space)lastName? What about:
John Q. Doe 25 M 3.2)
So you need to organize the data with separators, such as:
John Doe<t>25<t>M<t>3.2
(where <t> represents the TAB character)
Some folks will argue to just use the comma (,) as a separator - but that's inherantly bad, as the fields may have commas embedded within them, making it impossible to tell which commas are data versus separators.

[Stephen Barrow]

Ok,
So we need separators. No problem, but can you point me in the right direction on how to do the rest?

[Billybob Marshall]

// rather than hard-code directory names, get the file from the classpath
InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/yourfilenamehere");
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
while (true) {
  String line = reader.readLine();
  if (line == null) break;
  // now line contains e.g. John Doe<t>25<t>M<t>3.2
  String[] fields = line.split("\t"); // this might not be quite right - play with it
  // now fields[0] contains name, [1] contains age, etc
  String name = fields[0];
  String age = fields[1];
  // etc.
}

[Stephen Barrow]

Is this suppose to replace my existing code?

[Billybob Marshall]

Originally posted by Stephen Barrow:
Is this suppose to replace my existing code?

Take the ideas within, and incorporate them however you wish.