StreamTokenizer : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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StreamTokenizer

java.io.StreamTokenizer breaks up the ASCII text in a file into chunks at delimiters and hands them to you one at a time, preconverted to a binary double for numerics. See this StreamTokenizer code example. Watch the American spelling. Using StreamTokenizer on an InputStream is now deprecated. You are supposed to convert your InputStream to a BufferedReader then use it. Beware! resetSyntax does not behave as advertised. To clear all characters to behave as ordinary characters, rather than delimiters, you must use ordinaryChars(0,255) then start your modifications, with methods like: commentChar, quoteChar, whitespaceChars, wordChars . Make sure your files have a terminal CrLf when using StreamTokenizer. java.io.StringTokenizer is much simpler.

Reading Numeric Data From an ASCII file

Java has no built-in methods for reading data of the form: 123 456,-4.

You have to roll your own method. Use java.io.StreamTokenizer or java.util.StringTokenizer, perhaps in combination with readLine to get your data into strings. StreamTokenizer has bells and whistles to deal with parsing source code, including white space, comments and numbers. StringTokenizer just splits the text up based on delimiter characters. Then use the conversion methods in the conversion table to convert to integers etc.

StreamTokenizer Method of Reading Integers From An ASCII File

Learning More

Sun’s Javadoc on the StreamTokenizer class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_14 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_19 on your local Windows J: drive.

file I/O amanuensis
files and directories
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StringTokenizer

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