Java Q: Reading input text

[c_loke]

Just a quick question. I have to write something that reads a text file containing ascii text. There are paragraphs in the input file which are separated by blank single lines.

If I use a fileReader and a BufferedReader, how does it handle reading the separated blank single lines?


From reading the java doc, it says for the readLine method (which is what im trying to use)in BufferedReader,

"Read a line of text. A line is considered to be terminated by any one of a line feed ('\n'), a carriage return ('\r'), or a carriage return followed immediately by a linefeed. "

I think what it means is that readLine will terminate when it reads the separated blank single line. Can anyone confirm this?


The way I am approaching this is to read each line of the and then append the next line to the previous line until it reaches the end of the paragraph. However, I am unsure how readLine will handle the blank line so I am a bit hesitant to continue on.

Hopefully what I said was clear enough

 

[tim_m]

readLine() will return an empty string ("") when it reads an empty line so you can detect that to determine when you're going to get a new paragraph

 

[c_loke]

Ok great. And when readLine() reaches the end of the file, will it read null and return null?

 

[devman]

Ok great. And when readLine() reaches the end of the file, will it read null and return null?

The answer to this one is right in the API docs.

Yes readLine will return null at EOF.

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/BufferedReader.html#readLine()