[java] Reading and displaying data from a .txt file

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

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.

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.

public class PassdataintoFile {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException  {
        try {
            PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter("C:/new/hello.txt", "UTF-8");
            PrintWriter pw1 = new PrintWriter("C:/new/hello.txt");
             pw1.println("Hi chinni");
             pw1.print("your succesfully entered text into file");
             pw1.close();
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("C:/new/hello.txt"));
           String line;
           while((line = br.readLine())!= null)
           {
               System.out.println(line);
           }
           br.close();
    }

}

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);

:-)

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.

In Java 8, you can read a whole file, simply with:

public String read(String file) throws IOException {
  return new String(Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get(file)));
}

or if its a Resource:

public String read(String file) throws IOException {
  URL url = Resources.getResource(file);
  return Resources.toString(url, Charsets.UTF_8);
}

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();

Below is the code that you may try to read a file and display in java using scanner class. Code will read the file name from user and print the data(Notepad VIM files).

import java.io.*;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.io.*;

public class TestRead
{
public static void main(String[] input)
{
    String fname;
    Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);

    /* enter filename with extension to open and read its content */

    System.out.print("Enter File Name to Open (with extension like file.txt) : ");
    fname = scan.nextLine();

    /* this will reference only one line at a time */

    String line = null;
    try
    {
        /* FileReader reads text files in the default encoding */
        FileReader fileReader = new FileReader(fname);

        /* always wrap the FileReader in BufferedReader */
        BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(fileReader);

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

        /* always close the file after use */
        bufferedReader.close();
    }
    catch(IOException ex)
    {
        System.out.println("Error reading file named '" + fname + "'");
    }
}

}