Selecting an input file for Reader

[myazuid]

Hello,

I am trying to write a scanner, with the eventual aim of creating a parser to follow on from it. So I am trying to read a text file, look at each character one by one in order to decide what it is. My issue at the moment is how to allow to the user to select the file they wish to scan. Just a few questions:

1. Is the BufferedReader the correct reader to use?

2. If I am to use this, is it ok to simply limit the size of the buffer to one byte, will this ensure I am scanning one character at a time?

3. Can you ask a bufferedReader to read a variable? (which will be the filename of the text file that the user has asked for) i.e. Ask the user what file they want, store it as a variable called userFile and then have:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(userFile), 1);

Many thanks in advance for any help!

[xcallmejudasx]

I'm a little confused on a few things. When you say look at each character one by one in order to decide what it is. Do you mean decide if it's a character, int, etc or is it supposed to be like some variable already defined?

You might be able to attach a delimiter to your reader to only read 1 character at a time.

as for doing

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(userFile), 1);

I'd say yes because I did the exact same thing with BufferedWriter so it should work both ways.

[myazuid]

I have, since my post, spoken to a friend who has cleared some things up for me. I was going about it in the wrong way, apparently a char array is a better way, so you read in the entire line and then split it into characters to work out where tokens are and remove junk.

thank you for your help!

[neilcoffey]

If you need to read in line by line and then split each line at certain characters, the easiest way is probably to use BufferedReader.readLine() as you were doing, then use the String.split() method. For example, if your tokens are space-delimited:

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(f), "ISO-8859-1"));
try {
  String line;
  while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
  
    String[] toks = line.split(" +");
    for (String tok : toks) {
      // do something with 'tok'
    }

  }
} finally {
  br.close();
}

You pass a regular expression into String.split(). So " +" means "one or more spaces". You could also use "\\s+" for "one or more instances of whitespace". See the Pattern class for more details.