[bennitto]

Just started self-learning reading files as it will be useful for an upcoming assignment.

The problem I am having is how to read values from a line in a text file, assigning each item on a line to a variable.

I am able to achieve this using a scanner object but I have been told to use the BufferReader class.

At the moment I know how to read a line from the text file and assign that to a variable.

Any help, examples and/or pointers on how to read individual items on a line to a variable will be appreciated.

This post has been edited by bennitto: 01 November 2010 - 02:47 PM

[JackOfAllTrades]

Look, a tutorial!

[Dogstopper]

bennitto, on 01 November 2010 - 03:27 PM, said:

Just started self-learning reading files as it will be useful for an upcoming assignment.

The problem I am having is how to read values from a line in a text file, assigning each item on a line to a variable.

I am able to achieve this using a scanner object but I have been told to use the BufferReader class.

At the moment I know how to read a line from the text file and assign that to a variable.

Any help, examples and/or pointers on how to read individual items to a variable will be appreciated.

EDIT: a bonus will be how to calculate how many lines are in a text file.

The tutorial covers BufferedReader. Since you have to assign each line to a variable, I suggest using an arraylist to hold the lines and when you are done, take the size of the array and that is the number of lines in the array.

[bennitto]

JackOfAllTrades, on 01 November 2010 - 08:30 PM, said:

Look, a tutorial!

I had a look through the tutorial but it did not help me with what I wanted to achieve.

Btw, I figured out how to calculate the number of lines in a text file which did not use an arraylist.

[Dogstopper]

bennitto, on 01 November 2010 - 03:45 PM, said:

Btw, I figured out how to calculate the number of lines in a text file which did not use an arraylist.

So did I, but with an ArrayList, you kill more birds with one stone.

[bennitto]

maybe I could have defined my problem a lot better but here's a second try.

Suppose each line of the text file held information like for example:

john doe 20


Instead of reading the whole line using BufferedReader, how would I read john, doe & 20 and assign them to 3 different variables?

[Dogstopper]

You can use the String.split() method or a StringTokenizer.

[bennitto]

thanks, I found the string split method very easy to use. I should point out that when I read through the StringTokenizer class, its use is discouraged

[macosxnerd101]

The StringTokenizer class more or less wraps around the split() method. This extra bulk of the additional code causes a StringTokenizer to take up more memory than the String[] from the split() method, which is why it is discouraged. That being said, if you find it more intuitive to use than split(), that's your call. StringTokenizer functions just fine.