Return file data

Question

ok, I want to create a sub-routine in a spearate class that when I call it opens up a file and returns the file data result in a string.
so:
string = file.GetFile("filename.txt");
And that gives me the data contained in a file in one string varaible.
The annoying thing about it is I could do this in 20 seconds using Perl but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do it in java... being relativly new to the language. Web search have only turned up the same web pages and I'm getting desparte.

Answer 1

since it's a text file (.txt)..you can use this method
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
public String fileToString(String filename) throws IOException{
    String newline = System.getProperty("line.separator");
    BufferedReader in = null;
    StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
    try{
        in = BufferedReader(new FileReader(new File(filename)));
        String line = null;
        while ((line = in.readLine()) != null)
            buffer.append(line).append(newline);
        return buffer.toString();
    catch (IOException e){ throw e; }
    finally{
        try{ if (in != null) in.close(); }
        catch(Exception e){ System.out.println("Cannot close inpput file: " + filename); }
// in your class..you call up this method like this
String strFile;   // the string that holds the content of the file.
try{
    strFile = fileToString(filename);
catch (IOException e){ e.printStackTrace(); }better yet, you can use Jakarta Common IO library.
They have a FileUtils class that have useful methods for you..such as copy file to another destination
File file = new File("filename.txt");
String fileContent = FileUtils.readFileToString(file, "UTF-8");  // you can specify the encoding