Scanner method to get a char

Question

What is the Scanner method to get a char returned by the keyboard in Java.

like nextLine() for String, nextInt() for int, etc.

Answer 1

You can use the Console API (which made its appearance in Java 6) as follows:

Console cons = System.console();
if(cons != null) {
  char c = (char) cons.reader().read();  // Checking for EOF omitted
  ...
}

If you just need a single line you don't even need to go through the reader object:

String s = cons.readLine();

Answer 2

To get a char from a Scanner, you can use the findInLine method.

    Scanner sc = new Scanner("abc");
    char ch = sc.findInLine(".").charAt(0);
    System.out.println(ch); // prints "a"
    System.out.println(sc.next()); // prints "bc"

If you need a bunch of char from a Scanner, then it may be more convenient to (perhaps temporarily) change the delimiter to the empty string. This will make next() returns a length-1 string every time.

    Scanner sc = new Scanner("abc");
    sc.useDelimiter("");
    while (sc.hasNext()) {
        System.out.println(sc.next());
    } // prints "a", "b", "c"

Answer 3

Java's Scanner class does not have a built in method to read from a Scanner character-by-character.

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Scanner.html

However, it should still be possible to fetch individual characters from the Scanner as follows:

Scanner sc:

char c = sc.findInLine(".").charAt(0);

And you could use it to fetch each character in your scanner like this:

while(sc.hasNext()){
    char c = sc.findInLine(".").charAt(0);
    System.out.println(c); //to print out every char in the scanner
}

The findInLine() method searches through your scanner and returns the first String that matches the regular expression you give it.