How to read a whole file as a set of characters (including spaces)

Question

Hi,
I'mt trying to read a file, and i want to save each character in the file including the space character. Is there a new line char as well?
I'm using this at the moment because buffer reader loses my trailing spaces, but it's only taking the first word of my file:
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
            System.out.print("Enter a filename: ");
            String fileToRead = scan.nextLine();
            Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File(fileToRead));
            String file = sc.next(); //this only takes the first wordIs there any way of saving this whole file as a string so that it also remembers spaces and new lines?
Edited by: Cymae on Nov 12, 2007 12:04 AM

Answer 1

That isn't my experience with BufferedReader. If you use the readLine method it will read lines, throwing away the crlf, but if you use the read(buffer,ofs,len) methods it happily reads everything and puts it in a character array. You can then convert that to a string using the new String(buffer, ofs, len) method.
Here's a simple test case:
import java.io.*;
public class ReadTest {
     public static void main(String [] args) {
          for (String arg : args) {
               char [] buffer = new char[256]; ;
               try {
                    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(arg));
                    int len = 0;
                    System.out.println("reading from file="+arg);
                    while (true) {
                         len = reader.read(buffer,0, 256);
                         if (len == -1) {
                              break;
                         System.out.println("read "+len+" chars="+new String(buffer,0,len)+"||");
                         System.out.println("");
                    reader.close();
               } catch (IOException e) {
                    System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}