Reading from File

[eevaa]

Hey everyone! :)

I am trying to program a brief text adventure just for getting used to Java. Now what I want to do is: I've got large quantities of text outputs (descriptions, dialogues and so on), so I don't want to put all that text into my Java files. Of course what I first thought of is reading from a text file, but then I would need to know how to read only parts of the file. But only reading certain lines would make later changes to the text file almost impossible cause then I'd also have to change the line numbers everywhere. Now I am looking for a way to read parts of a file by index. Does anyone know a proper way of doing so? I've also thought of XML but I don't know if that would work and reading those files seems rather complicated...

I'd be really thankful for your help!

[gcalvin]

You're probably better off using a database for this. Otherwise, you're re-inventing the wheel.

-Gary-

[StormyWaters]

You might be able to get away with a Properties file. Properties (The Java™ Tutorials > Essential Classes > The Platform Environment)

[Norm]

a way to read parts of a file by index

Does that mean that each section of the file starts at line whose number would be in a separate file?
Could you break the data up into separate files for each section and use naming conventions to define the sections. The files could be put into a jar/zip file to only have a single physical file to deal with.

[eevaa]

Ookay, the database thing sound great. I'll have a look at how to work with databases. Also, using properties might be really really useful. Thank's alot!