Reading a line of text from a file and storing it into a String

Question

Basically what I'm trying to do is store an entire line from a text file and store it into one string. The line is the class department, the class number, and the semester it is being taken. For example, "CSCE 155A - Fall 2011". I want to put all of that into one string called "description".

className = scanner.next();
System.out.println(className); 

This line of code will only output the first part, CSCE. Is there a way to store the entire line? The only thing I can think of is several scanner.next() and print statements, but that seems messy

Answer 1

From the docs on String Scanner.next():

Finds and returns the next complete token from this scanner. A complete token is preceded and followed by input that matches the delimiter pattern. This method may block while waiting for input to scan, even if a previous invocation of hasNext() returned true.

Because your example line is: "CSCE 155A - Fall 2011", it next() will stop at the first space.

What you need is Scanner.nextLine():

className = scanner.nextLine();

Answer 2

If you are using Java 7, may be you want to use NIO.2, eg:

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    // The file to read
    File file = new File("test.csv");

    // The charset for read the file
    Charset cs = StandardCharsets.UTF_8;

    // Read all lines
    List<String> lines = Files.readAllLines(file.toPath(), cs);
    for (String line : lines) {
        System.out.println(line);
    }

    // Read line by line
    try (BufferedReader reader = Files.newBufferedReader(file.toPath(), cs)) {
        for (String line; (line = reader.readLine()) != null;) {
            System.out.println(line);
        }
    }
}