FileReader or Scanner?

[Justin Fox]

I've head of people using this "FileReader", isn't it just as easy to just use Scanner?

like so:

  
 
Scanner scan;
 
try{
scan = New Scanner("myfile.txt");
}catch(Exception e){//error message here.}
 
/* then you can just do */
 
while(scan.next()){} // each word.
 
// or
 
while(scan.nextLine()){} // each line.
  

Thanks,

Justin Fox

[Joanne Neal]

Depends what JRE's you want to support. Scanner was only introduced in Java 1.5.

[Jim Yingst]

Yeah, generally I think Scanner is better for just about everything, but it simply didn't exist in earlier JDKs - that's why people use FileReader.

[Justin Fox]

oh ok.

why would you use 1.5? I mean, version 6 is out now...

Justin Fox

[Ulf Dittmer]

Well, Scanner was in 1.5, so the proper question would be "who wants to use 1.4?" Reading through the posts here on JavaRanch, the answer is obviously "many people".

As to why someone would use Java 1.5, well, not all operating systems have a released version of Java 6 yet, OS X being the most prominent one.

[Joanne Neal]

Also a lot of code was written when 1.4 was the latest JRE. Even if newer developments of this code are being written in 1.6, people are not going to want to rewrite existing, correctly functioning code just to use a different class.
[ April 04, 2008: Message edited by: Joanne Neal ]

[Justin Fox]

cool, that makes sense.

Thanks for the info,

Justin Fox