Using function equivalent to sscanf in JAVA

Question

Hello,
All I want to do in java is to read the data saved in a buffer( a lot of numbers and characters seperated by semicolons) and organize it into columns of data saved in an outfile!!!! To this end each number or character seperated by a " ; " from the other has a special meaning and I need to save each one in a seperate variable to be able to use it in later simulation.I also dont know how much data is saved in the string. I just know that it is there and I need to extract it to something HUMAN readable.
So I have this string of numbers and letters saved in a buffer string s.
500 ; -5.0E-1 ; 4.0E-3 ; 2.0E-8 ; 0 ; "s" ; "V"
(ignore the spaces, I just wanted you to be able to read the characters easily)
So if I was using C I would ve simply use sscanf
sscanf( s , "%d;%e;%e;%e;%d;%[^;];%s", &nr_pt, &yoff, &ymult,
&xincr, &pt_off, xunit,yunit );
to read the data saved in s and save it to 7 other variables.
But how would I do this in JAVA, so desperate! Do I use some functions like read or read line or....
So here I knew that I have 7 variable, what if I do not know how many data points is saved in the string and I want to read one by one and save it or print it to a file!
Thanks,
Sanaz

Answer 1

You can read the thing in as a String, and then use the String's "split" method to split that up into an array of substrings. Then you can deal with each substring individually, converting them to numeric types via Double.parseDouble() for example.
Or you might want to look at the Scanner class.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/index.html