Java reading a line with multiple line breaks within

Question

I have a file with three lines in. I want to read in each line into a string. Im planning on using the java buffered reader

I thought i'd do a while loop that reads a line until it reaches end of the line (\n) then store that into a variables and continue until EOF is reached.

Reason why this won't be a duplicate question is my text file has loads of \n within it per line. As seen below. How would I then be able to read a line and store it into a string. The line breaks are needed as the display requires the option to be on its own line

example.txt

Q1: (A + B)*(A+B) \n 1. A*A + B*B \n 2. A*A +A*B + B*B \n 3. A*A +2*A*B + B*B \n
Q2: (A + B)*(A - B) \n 1. A*A + 2*B*B \n 2. A*A - B*B \n 3. A*A -2*A*B + B*B \n
Q3: sin(x)*sin(x) + cos(x)*cos(x) \n 1. 1 \n 2. 2 \n 3. 3 \n

A line with a line break inside it is not one line, it is two lines. — Jesper
– Jesper, Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 19:26
You could ecape the embedded line breaks. If not, you have to parse the line. — Axel
– Axel, Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 19:37
How can you tell the embedded linebreaks apart from the "real" linebreaks? — The Spooniest
– The Spooniest, Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 19:41
Do you control the format of the file? It would be much more useful to have a delimiter which is never part of the actual question. For e.g. a special char like ~. Best would be to have a proper text format like TSV (tab separated file) or a YAML file... — Sanjay T. Sharma
– Sanjay T. Sharma, Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 20:13

Todoy · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-20 19:50:15Z

3

As @Jesper mentioned in the comments your definion of a line is a bit off. Your best bet is to read in multiple lines until you find a delimiter that your looking for. In this case it seem like you should be looking for Q followed by a number and a colon.

if reading everything in at once is not a problem you can even do something like this.

fullString.split("(?<=Q\\d:)");

The resulting array will each contain a single question, assuming your text does not contain Q#: somewhere in it.

edited Feb 20, 2015 at 19:50

answered Feb 20, 2015 at 19:37

Todoy

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Utsav Dawn · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-20 19:44:20Z

0

You can use Scanner class's useDelimiter method. Like this:

Scanner scanner = new Scanner(new File("example.txt"));
scanner.useDelimiter("Q");
while (scanner.hasNext()) {
    String line[i++] = scanner.next();
}

answered Feb 20, 2015 at 19:44

Utsav Dawn

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