How to get characters from a line in a file ?

Question

Hello Everybody ,
I am able to read the lines from the file using readLine( ) method.
But i do not want to read anything that comes after the character '#'
Any thing that follows a '#' character is considered as a commet in my case.
The contents of my input file are,
#Character mappings for Japanese Shift-JIS character set
#ASCII character Mapped Shift-JIS character
m 227,128,133 #Half width katakana letter small m
n 227,128,134 #Half width katakana letter small n
o 227,129,129
p 227,129,130
q 227,129,131
r 227,129,132
s 227,129,133
t 227,129,134
u 227,129,135
v 227,129,136
w 227,129,137
x 227,129,138
y 227,129,139
z 227,129,142
My code to read the contents of the file is,
import java.io.*;
class Read
public static void main(String s[])
try{
int i=0,j,l;
BufferedReader in=new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(
new FileInputStream("Character.txt")));
String []str=new String[100];
while(true)
str=in.readLine();
if(str[i]==null) break;
System.out.println(str[i]);
i++;
catch(Exception e)
e.printStackTrace();
System.out.println(e);
How do i store the values within a line in the file
to two different variables
Like say,
I read the line
i get the character 'm' store it in a variable say, char ch='m' ;
and the corresponding value 227,128,133 in a String variable.
String str="227,128,133";
Please offer some suggesstions and help me out .
Any suggesstions would be welcome and very useful.
Thanks and regards
khurram

Answer 1

It depends on whether the format of the file will ever change. If the "rules" regarding the structure of the file are predictable, then it's fairly simple.
In the sample file, if we assume that anything that starts with # should be ignored, and all relevant lines begin with single char, followed by three comma separated integers; then you can just do the following (haven't tested this)
import java.io.*;
class Read
     public static void main(String s[])
          try{
               // Create a Map to store the results..
               Map data = new HashMap();
               // We will store the actual values in an array
               int[] values = null;
               // Each valid line has a character
               char theChar;
               // Temp storage for the integer values
               String[] strValues = null;
               BufferedReader in=new BufferedReader(
               new InputStreamReader(
               new FileInputStream("Character.txt")));
               String str=null;
                  while(true)
                    str=in.readLine();
                    if(str==null) break;
                    // trim to remove any spaces
                    str = str.trim();
                    theChar = str.charAt(0);
                    if(theChar != '#') {
                         // not a comment
                         // Split to get the int
                         strValues = str.substring(1, str.length()).split(",");
                         // We only want the first 3 tokens
                         values = new int[3];
                         for(int i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
                              values[i] = Integer.parseInt(strValues);
                         // Now, add the results to the map
                         data.put(String.valueOf(theChar, values);
                         System.out.println(str);
          catch(Exception e)
               e.printStackTrace();
               System.out.println(e);
This will leave you with a Map of the character mappings, keyed on the String value of the character (just because you can't store a char in a Map)