How do I read a character and advance the scanner to the next one?

Question

Hi,
I'm writing a lexical and grammar analyzer and I don't usually program in Java. I have a method that reads one character and then parses it. The problem is that it keeps reading the same character over and over again, so my program gets stuck in an infinite loop.
How do I make it so that BufferedReader advances to the next character in the string?
Here is the code so far:
public static void getChar()
            throws FileNotFoundException, UnsupportedEncodingException, IOException {
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader
                (new FileInputStream(inputFileName), Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
        int c;
        if ((c = reader.read()) != -1){
            if (c != 32)
                nextChar = (char) c;
            if (Character.isLetter(nextChar))
                charClass = LETTER;
            else if (Character.isDigit(nextChar))
                charClass = DIGIT;
            else
                charClass = UNKNOWN;
        else{
            charClass = EOF;
            //System.out.println("Next Token is: RES_WORD. Next lexeme is: EOF.");
    } //end getChar.At first I just had a while loop, but I want this method to be called from another method and so I didn't think the while loop worked. Is there a better way?
Help is much appreciated.
EDIT: By the way, I don't want to read tokens. I need it to be characters. And it doesn't have to be BufferedReader. I'm open to suggestions.
EDIT2: While I don't want to read tokens, if it's the simplest way then I'm open to it. The scanner class would work for that I guess, but then I would have to do a charAt stuff. I'm open to your insight.
Edited by: RommelR on Feb 25, 2010 8:39 AM
Edited by: RommelR on Feb 25, 2010 9:00 AM

Answer 1

DrClap wrote:
Every time you call that method, you open a new BufferedReader on the file and read the first character from it. So yes, you always get the same character. Solution: Don't open the BufferedReader in that method. Open it somewhere else, just once, and use it in that method.Thanks. That was stupid of me.