Keyboard input makes program hang

Question

Hi,
I'm writing a small web service client that takes 2 numbers, sends them to the service and gets the sum/division/product/substraction back as an answer.
I'm finished with the C/S programming and all I want to do is for the user to input the numbers himself. I wrote the following lines, which should work just fine but for some reason the program hangs and when I type sthg, there's no input. Does anyone have an idea why?
private static float getNum() throws IOException
     float a;
     String message;
     BufferedReader stdin = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader(System.in));
     System.out.println("Enter a number (float): ");
     message = stdin.readLine();
     // the following line is never reached.
     System.out.println ("You entered: \"" + message + "\"");
     a = Float.parseFloat(message);
     return a;
}Thanks.

Answer 1

something else must be swallowing System.in ??
how exactly are you running it?
an Ant task still has access to System.in from my tests eg
1)<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<project default="all">
    <target name="all">
        <taskdef name="TestInput" classname="TestTask"/>
        <TestInput/>
    </target>
</project>2)import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
public class TestTask {
     public void execute() {
          try {
               BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
               List result = new ArrayList();
               for(String line=""; ((line=br.readLine())!=null) && !line.trim().equalsIgnoreCase("quit"); ) {
                    result.add(line);
               System.out.println("Got: "+result.size());
          } catch(Exception e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
     public static void main(String[]arg) throws Exception {
          new TestTask().execute();
}3) compile TestTask.java
4) save xml above as test.xml in same directory as the TestTask.class file
5) type "ant -buildfile test.xml"
everything works as expected..
you're not trying to access System.in via jsp or something??