What's the best way of parsing a fixed-width formatted file in Java?

Question

I've got a file from a vendor that has 115 fixed-width fields per line. What's the best way of parsing that file into the 115 fields so I can use them in my code?

My first thought is just to make constants for each field like NAME_START_POSITION and NAME_LENGTH and using substring. That just seems ugly so I'm curious if there's any other recommended ways of doing this. None of the couple of libraries a Google search turned up seemed any better either. Thanks

Answer 1

I would use a flat file parser like flatworm instead of reinventing the wheel: it has a clean API, is simple to use, has decent error handling and a simple file format descriptor. Another option is jFFP but I prefer the first one.

Answer 2

I've played arround with fixedformat4j and it is quite nice. Easy to configure converters and the like.

Answer 3

The Apache Commons CSV project can handle fixed with files.