Reading in a certain number of characters from a file.

Question

Hi guys,
I need some pointers on how to read in a specified number of characters from a text file.For example,how would I read in the first 100 characters to an array from a text file with an unspecfied number of characters (more than 100 rather than less!).
At present I am getting code errors being thrown due to reading in beyond the array size ie
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 100.

Answer 1

post more code , this exception tells me nothing
without seeing what you are actually doing.
public String getText (String file)//textfile to be analyzed will be inputted as argument 150407 0356
   //15042007 0612 Check notes on overloaded getText method below.
       int temp;
       inputFile = file;
       int i=0;
            try
                BufferedReader bGetFile = new BufferedReader (new FileReader(inputFile));
                while ((temp=bGetFile.read())!=-1)
                    textFromFile[i] = (char)temp;
                    i++;
                /*for (int j=0;j<MAX;j++)
                    System.out.print(textFromFile[j]);//25042007 0208.For Testing purposes
                inputText=new String(textFromFile).trim();
                bGetFile.close();
            catch (IOException e)
                System.out.println (" ");
                System.out.println ("Sorry.An error occurred while trying to read from the input file.Unable to proceed!");
            System.out.println ("Processing the input text file "); //25042007 2318 being used for debugging purposes.          
            return inputText;
    }If the file being read is greater than MAX characters it will throw the exception mentioned.What I would like to do is read in MAX characters and discard the rest.