Best way to parse data

Question

Hi, I'm fairly new to java programming coming from a midrange, COBOL background.
I need to take data from a legacy program and use it in an online java program. The data is stored in a table that occurs 1-25 times:
05  DATA-TABLE OCCURS 25 TIMES.
       10  FIELD1                       PIC X(25).
       10  FIELD2                       PIC X(25).
       10  FIELD3                       PIC X(50).  So, I could have between 100 and 2500 bytes of data to deal with in the java program. Can anyone point me in the right direction on the best way to handle this? I thought about creating an intial Array that has 25 elements and then substring-ing the returned data into that. Then, what would be the best way to break that data down to the individual components?
If you have any solutions or pointers, I would definitely appreciate it.
Thanks!
bfrmbama

Answer 1

I would say to you to start giving meaning to your data and puting it in classes, for example if your data is about pet animals and you have the animal's name, nick and description:
package example;
* @author leonardo     12/11/2004
* @version 1.0
public class Pet {
    private String name;
    private String nick;
    private String description;
     * Create a pet from the string with the triplet atributes.
     * @param triplet The triplet data.
    public Pet( String triplet ) {
        tokenize( triplet );
     * Method for tokenizing the pet data.
     * @param triplet the data.
    private void tokenize(String triplet) {
         * I am assuming the data is space separated,
         * look at the api to see a complete usage of
         * split and maybe the string tokenizer.
        String[] strings = triplet.split(" ");
        name = strings[1];
        nick = strings[2];
        description = strings[3];
     * Its always a good idea to encapsulate your data
     * and give access to it through accessors and mutators.
    public String getDescription() {
        return description;
    public void setDescription(String description) {
        this.description = description;
    public String getName() {
        return name;
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    public String getNick() {
        return nick;
    public void setNick(String nick) {
        this.nick = nick;
}then when you tokenize your file you can do:
// ... Incomplete ...
// I am assuming you will write a CobolFileReader that implements the file reading and line
// extratction logic. when there is no more data to be read it returns null
   List list = new ArrayList();
    CobolFileReader cobolFileReader = new CobolFileReader("TheFile.txt");
        for(String triplet = cobolFileReader.getNextTripet(); triplet != null; triplet = cobolFileReader.getNextTripet()) {
            list.add( new Pet( triplet ) );
  This way you will have a lista as big as it needs to be.