Using a text file in Eclipse...I'm confused

I am working on an app that has a large amount of static content - thousands of lines of data. My plan is to ultimately distribute a .jar that would include a file that contains this data (as text, XML, etc.) Some classes in the app read through this data and use it.

So...how do I access this file within Java? It's not a FileReader operation (I don't think) because it's "in the jar" not "on the filesystem".

Also, within Eclipse, as I'm working on the code, is there a way I can define it as a "will be in the jar" file in the Project? The file is defined in a subfolder in my src tree, but my attempts to access it haven't been successful.

If someone can recommend a breadcrumb trail, I can read up - I'm just asking what the best way to do that is.

Do I want to create an Ant task to create the jar every time I run tests or build? I'm using JUnit heavily for testing, so hopefully when I "Run As JUnit," that would work, too.

Thanks!

You are smart to ask these questions and are quite right -- there aren't "files" in a jar. You could get access to the text via an InputStream, and this can be obtained via the Class method getResourceAsStream. A Scanner object can read the text easily, as can an InputStreamReader which you'd likely wrap in a BufferedStreamReader.