Reading and displaying data from a .txt file

Question

How do you read and display data from .txt files?

Answer 1

In general:

• Create a FileInputStream for the file.
• Create an InputStreamReader wrapping the input stream, specifying the correct encoding
• Optionally create a BufferedReader around the InputStreamReader, which makes it simpler to read a line at a time.
• Read until there's no more data (e.g. readLine returns null)
• Display data as you go or buffer it up for later.

If you need more help than that, please be more specific in your question.

Answer 2

If your file is strictly text, I prefer to use the java.util.Scanner class.

You can create a Scanner out of a file by:

Scanner fileIn = new Scanner(new File(thePathToYourFile));

Then, you can read text from the file using the methods:

fileIn.nextLine(); // Reads one line from the file
fileIn.next(); // Reads one word from the file

And, you can check if there is any more text left with:

fileIn.hasNext(); // Returns true if there is another word in the file
fileIn.hasNextLine(); // Returns true if there is another line to read from the file

Once you have read the text, and saved it into a String, you can print the string to the command line with:

System.out.print(aString);
System.out.println(aString);

The posted link contains the full specification for the Scanner class. It will be helpful to assist you with what ever else you may want to do.

Answer 3

You most likely will want to use the FileInputStream class:

int character;
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer("");
FileInputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(new File("/home/jessy/file.txt"));

while( (character = inputStream.read()) != -1)
        buffer.append((char) character);

inputStream.close();
System.out.println(buffer);

You will also want to catch some of the exceptions thrown by the read() method and FileInputStream constructor, but those are implementation details specific to your project.

Answer 4

If you want to take some shortcuts you can use Apache Commons IO:

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;

String data = FileUtils.readFileToString(new File("..."), "UTF-8");
System.out.println(data);

:-)

Answer 5

I love this piece of code, use it to load a file into one String:

File file = new File("/my/location");
String contents = new Scanner(file).useDelimiter("\\Z").next();

Answer 6

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("<Filename>"));

Then, you can use in.readLine(); to read a single line at a time. To read until the end, write a while loop as such:

String line;
while((line = in.readLine()) != null)
{
    System.out.println(line);
}