Options on Opening Files

[Rob Hunter]

I was wondering what are the various options available for opening and reading from files in Java. I'm trying to open a file and parse through it grabbing each line which consists of :
value 1 <delimiter> value 2 <delimiter> value 3.....

I wanted to assign each value into a separate array or other such object. Each of these values will represent an entity(ies) that will be used when I use JFreeChart to create some graphs. Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

RH

[Gabriel White]

Use BufferedReader

    
 
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
   String nextLine = "";
   StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
   while ((nextLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
     //...get the value and store in array
 
   }

[Campbell Ritchie]

If you have a text file with a predictable sequence of contents, you can use a java.util.Scanner. I suspect it incorporates BufferedReaders, but can be used as a single object. It only works on simple, predictable, text files as far as I know, however.

[Rob Hunter]

Here's what I was going to use:

File contents = new File(path);
FileInputStream contentStr = new FileInputStream(contents);
BufferedInputStream contentBuff = new BufferedInputStream(contentStr); DataInputStream contentData = new DataInputStream(contentBuff);

Whats the easiest way to break up each line read in into separate components (i.e. tilde delimited list of values) and best/easiest way to store the values for reference later on (loop through each value and store in a dataset for use in a JFreeChart)? Thanks again.

Rob

[Stan James]

I'd go with the little BufferedReader example Gabriel showed - pretty much the textbook way to read a text file - and maybe String.split() for the delimited fields.

Are you ok with this bit of syntax - it's a little hard to figure out the first time you see it:

while ((nextLine = br.readLine()) != null)

Campbell's suggestion for Scanner is a bit more advanced and has a good cool factor. Go back and try it after you get the BufferedReader under your belt.

If your delimited fields are tricky, say like CSV exports from Excel, then splitting the line will be more effort.

Let us know how you do!

[Jim Yingst]

[Stan James]: Campbell's suggestion for Scanner is a bit more advanced

A Scanner has more advanced options (and more methods total) than a BufferedReader. But using it can actually be simpler. For one thing, you usually don't need to combine it with other readers like FileReader. The equivalent of Gabriel's code would be:

Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File(filename));
while (sc.hasNextLine())
     String line = sc.nextLine();
     //...get the value and store in array
}

Digression: the only thing I don't like is that Scanner conceals exceptions if you don't think to check when you're done:

if (sc.ioException() != null)
    throw sc.ioException();

Of course, PrintWriter has the same problem (worse since PrintWriter doesn't let you discover what the error was), and it almost never actually matters in practice. Seems like 99.9% of the errors you might encounter are thrown by the constructor, not the later read/write methods. So Scanner and PrintWriter work well for most all practical purposes.
[ May 01, 2007: Message edited by: Jim Yingst ]

[Stan James]

Good point on Scanner. I was imagining using regex to specify delimiters, but our intrepid original poster can get a lot of mileage out of it without regex.

I will stick with one bit of earlier advice - we've given two suggestions, try em both. Make a place to save short snippets of code for common things because you will want them again one day. And have fun.